But there is a third argument, less practical in appearance but bolder and deeper, which is really decisive of the matter, though few seem to have seen it or at least taken it up.  The separation of romance and novel—­of the story of incident and the story of character and motive—­is a mistake logically and psychologically.  It is a very old mistake, and it has deceived some of the elect:  but a mistake it is.  It made even Dr. Johnson think Fielding shallower than Richardson; and it has made people very different from Dr. Johnson think that Count Tolstoi is a greater analyst and master of a more developed humanity than Fielding.  As a matter of fact, when you have excogitated two or more human beings out of your own head and have set them to work in the narrative (not the dramatic) way, you have made the novel in posse, if not in esse, from its apparently simplest development, such as Daphnis and Chloe, to its apparently most complex, such as the Kreutzer Sonata or the triumphs of Mr. Meredith.  You have started the “Imitation”—­the “fiction”—­and tout est la.  The ancients could do this in the dramatic way admirably, though on few patterns; in the poetical way as admirably, but again not on many.  The Middle Ages lost the dramatic way almost entirely, but they actually improved the poetical on its narrative side, and the result was Romance.  In every romance there is the germ of a novel and more; there is at least the suggestion and possibility of romance in every novel that deserves the name.  In the Tristram story and the Lancelot cycle there are most of the things that the romancer of incident and the novelist of character and motive can want or can use, till the end of the world; and Malory (that “mere compiler” as some pleasantly call him) has put the possibilities of the latter and greater creation so that no one who has eyes can miss them.  Nor in the beginning does it much or at all matter whether the vehicle was prose or verse.  In fact they mostly wrote in verse because prose was not ready.

In the minor romances and tales (taking English versions only) from Havelok to Beryn there is a whole universe of situation, scenario, opportunity for “business.”  That they have the dress and the scene-backing of one particular period can matter to no one who has eyes for anything beyond dress and scene-backing.  And when we are told that they are apt to run too much into grooves and families, it is sufficient to answer that it really does not lie in the mouth of an age which produces grime-novels, problem-novels, and so forth, as if they had been struck off on a hectograph, possessing the not very exalted gift of varying names and places—­to reproach any other age on this score.  But we have only limited room here for generalities and still less for controversy; let us turn to our proper work and survey the actual turn-out in fiction—­mostly as a result of mere fashion, verse, but partly prose—­which the Middle Ages has left us as a contribution to this department of English literature.