it was impossible for Mr. Morris to have anything to do with shams—­even his socialism was not that—­and they were in reality a revival, however Rip van Winklish it might seem, of the pure old romance itself, at the hands of a nineteenth-century sorcerer, who no doubt put a little of the nineteenth century into them.  The best—­probably the best of all is The Well at the World’s End (1896)—­have an extraordinary charm for any one who can taste romance:  and are by no means unlikely to awake the taste for it in generations to come.  But for the present the thing lay out of the way of its generation, and was not comprehended or enjoyed thereby.  For it is no doubt nearly as annoying to have bread given to you when you want thistles as to have thistles given to you when you want bread.  But just as the ballad is the appointed reviver of poetry, so is romance the appointed reviver of prose-fiction:  and in one form or another it will surely do its work, sooner or later.

Here it may be best to stop the actual current of critical comment on individuals.  Something has been hinted as to the general present condition of the novel, but there is no need to emphasise it or to enter into particulars about it:  indeed, even if such a proceeding were convenient in one way it would be very inconvenient in another.  One might, for instance, have to consider, rather curiously, a remarkable statement recently attributed to a popular novelist that “the general standard of excellence in fiction is higher to-day than ever it was before.”  But we can take higher ground.  Far be it from me to bow to the Baal of “up-to-dateness,” for even if I had any such hankering, I think I should remember that the surest way of being out-of-date to-morrow is the endeavour to be up-to-date to-day.  Only by keeping perspective can you hope to confirm and steady your view:  only by relinquishing the impossible attempt to be complete can you achieve a relative completeness.

Yet it is well to remember that Lockhart, one of the best critics who ever lived (when he let himself be so), a novelist too, and not likely to lose an opportunity of magnifying his office if he could, took occasion, in noticing the novels of his friend Theodore Hook at poor “Mr. Wagg’s” death, gravely to deplore the decadence of the novel generally:  and not much later, in reprinting the article, had the wisdom to recognise, and the courage to record, the fact that Thackeray had disappointed his prognostications.  Literature, it has been said, is the incalculable of incalculables:  and not only may a new novelist arise to-morrow, but some novelist who has been writing for almost any number of years may change his style, strike the vein, and begin the exploitation of a new gold-field in novel-production.

But this does not affect the retrospect of the past.  There we are on perfectly firm ground—­ground which we have traversed carefully already, and which we may survey in surety now.