The answer is simply that there seems no room for good drama and good fiction at the same time in literature; drama and novels cannot exist side by side, and the novel had to wait for the decadence of the drama before it could appear and triumph.  If one were to make a table of succession for the various kinds of literature as they have been used naturally and spontaneously (not academically), the order would be the epic, the drama, the novel; and it would be obvious at once that the order stood for something more than chronological succession, and that literature in its function as a representation and criticism of life passed from form to form in the search of greater freedom, greater subtlety, and greater power.  At present we seem to be at the climax of the third stage in this development; there are signs that the fourth is on the way, and that it will be a return to drama, not to the old, formal, ordered kind, but, something new and freer, ready to gather up and interpret what there is of newness and freedom in the spirit of man and the society in which he lives.

The novel, then, had to wait for the drama’s decline, but there was literary story-telling long before that.  There were mediaeval romances in prose and verse; Renaissance pastoral tales, and stories of adventure; collections, plenty of them, of short stories like Boccaccio’s, and those in Painter’s Palace of Pleasure.  But none of these, not even romances which deal in moral and sententious advice like Euphues, approach the essence of the novel as we know it.  They are all (except Euphues, which is simply a framework of travel for a book of aphorisms) simple and objective; they set forth incidents or series of incidents; long or short they are anecdotes only—­they take no account of character.  It was impossible we should have the novel as distinct from the tale, till stories acquired a subjective interest for us; till we began to think about character and to look at actions not only outwardly, but within at their springs.

As has been stated early in this book, it was in the seventeenth century that this interest in character was first wakened.  Shakespeare had brought to the drama, which before him was concerned with actions viewed outwardly, a psychological interest; he had taught that “character is destiny,” and that men’s actions and fates spring not from outward agencies, but from within in their own souls.  The age began to take a deep and curious interest in men’s lives; biography was written for the first time and autobiography; it is the great period of memoir-writing both in England and France; authors like Robert Burton came, whose delight it was to dig down into human nature in search for oddities and individualities of disposition; humanity as the great subject of enquiry for all men, came to its own.  All this has a direct bearing on the birth of the novel.  One transient form of literature in the seventeenth century—­the Character—­is