root a profoundly true and noble one; it serves to distinguish modern fiction philosophically from all that is earlier, and it led the late Sidney Lanier, in the well-known book on this subject, to base the entire development upon the working out of the idea of personality.  The Novel seems to have been the special literary instrument in the eighteenth century for the propagation of altruism; here lies its deepest significance.  It was a baptism which promised great things for the lusty young form.

We are now ready for a fair working definition of the modern Novel.  It means a study of contemporary society with an implied sympathetic interest, and, it may be added, with special reference to love as a motor force, simply because love it is which binds together human beings in their social relations.

This aim sets off the Novel in contrast with past fiction which exhibits a free admixture of myth and marvel, of creatures human, demi-human and supernatural, with all time or no time for the enactment of its events.  The modern story puts its note of emphasis upon character that is contemporary and average; and thus makes a democratic appeal against that older appeal which, dealing with exceptional personages—­kings, leaders, allegorical abstractions—­is naturally aristocratic.

There was something, it would appear, in the English genius which favored a form of literature—­or modification of an existing form—­allowing for a more truthful representation of society, a criticism (in the Arnoldian sense) of the passing show.  The elder romance finds its romantic effect, as a rule, in the unusual, the strange and abnormal aspects of life, not so much seen of the eye as imagined of the mind or fancy.  Hence, romance is historically contrasted with reality, with many unfortunate results when we come to its modern applications.  The issue has been a Babel-like mixture of terms.

Or when the bizarre or supernatural was not the basis of appeal, it was found in the sickly and absurd treatment of the amatory passion, quite as far removed from the every-day experience of normal human nature.  It was this kind of literature, with the French La Calprenede as its high priest, which my Lord Chesterfield had in mind when he wrote to his son under date of 1752, Old Style:  “It is most astonishing that there ever could have been a people idle enough to write such endless heaps of the same stuff.  It was, however, the occupation of thousands in the last century; and is still the private though disavowed amusement of young girls and sentimental ladies.”  The chief trait of these earlier fictions, besides their mawkishness, is their almost incredible long-windedness; they have the long breath, as the French say; and it may be confessed that the great, pioneer eighteenth century novels, foremost those of Richardson, possess a leisureliness of movement which is an inheritance of the romantic past when men, both fiction writers and readers, seem to have Time; they look back to Lyly, and forward (since history repeats itself here), to Henry James.  The condensed, breathless fiction of a Kipling is the more logical evolution.