its struggles and temptations and triumphs or failures, like our own; and any work that faithfully represents life becomes interesting.  So we drop the adventure story and turn to the novel.  For the novel is a work of fiction in which the imagination and the intellect combine to express life in the form of a story and the imagination is always directed and controlled by the intellect.  It is interested chiefly, not in romance or adventure, but in men and women as they are; it aims to show the motives and influences which govern human life, and the effects of personal choice upon character and destiny.  Such is the true novel,[213] and as such it opens a wider and more interesting field than any other type of literature.

PRECURSORS OF THE NOVEL.  Before the novel could reach its modern stage, of a more or less sincere attempt to express human life and character, it had to pass through several centuries of almost imperceptible development.  Among the early precursors of the novel we must place a collection of tales known as the Greek Romances, dating from the second to the sixth centuries.  These are imaginative and delightful stories of ideal love and marvelous adventure,[214] which profoundly affected romance writing for the next thousand years.  A second group of predecessors is found in the Italian and Spanish pastoral romances, which were inspired by the Eclogues of Virgil.  These were extremely popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and their influence is seen later in Sidney’s Arcadia, which is the best of this type in English.

The third and most influential group of predecessors of the novel is made up of the romances of chivalry, such as are found in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.  It is noticeable, in reading these beautiful old romances in different languages, that each nation changes them somewhat, so as to make them more expressive of national traits and ideals.  In a word, the old romance tends inevitably towards realism, especially in England, where the excessive imagination is curbed and the heroes become more human.  In Malory, in the unknown author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and especially in Chaucer, we see the effect of the practical English mind in giving these old romances a more natural setting, and in making the heroes suggest, though faintly, the men and women of their own day.  The Canterbury Tales, with their story interest and their characters delightfully true to nature, have in them the suggestion, at least, of a connected story whose chief aim is to reflect life as it is.

In the Elizabethan Age the idea of the novel grows more definite.  In Sidney’s Arcadia (1580), a romance of chivalry, the pastoral setting at least is generally true to nature; our credulity is not taxed, as in the old romances, by the continual appearance of magic or miracles; and the characters, though idealized till they become tiresome, occasionally give the impression of being real men and women.