This profound view of life and its arts is now familiar to us, but it was strange and revolutionary to the contemporaries of Herder. It involved a reconstruction of ideas regarding art, and a reorganisation of knowledge. The great conception of society as a development, an unfolding under certain fixed conditions and laws, was implicit in it. Goethe, with his poetic sensitiveness to the approach of new ideas, and that amplitude of mind which made him hospitable to new truth, accepted the nature of man as having the authority of a revelation, and refused to reject any part of it. In history, religion, art, and literature he discerned the endeavour of the soul to express itself, its experience, and its hopes; the natural history of man is written in his works; they all issue from his life, and together they form the record and disclosure of his nature.

In this manner a new and deeper view of literature was presented, and now holds the field against all mechanical

and individualistic theories. It is an interpretation not to be pressed too far, but one which broadly expresses the fundamental truth when it declares that literature is a vital product of the soul, a comprehensive and harmonious art and, therefore, a revelation of life to men. This idea is the largest and most fruitful result of criticism; of the study not of one piece of literature, or of one form of literature, or even of the literature of a race, but of all literature.

Chapter XXXVIII

THE

The Novel: Evolution

HE story of incident and adventure, and the romance pure and simple, are as old as literature. The story element enters into the epic, the drama, and the ballad; it is one of the original and primary elements of literature. Collections of stories were well known in classical times; stories have been told by professional raconteurs in Oriental countries from time immemorial, and are still recited to listening groups in Bagdad and Damascus. The mediæval romances were numberless and of almost interminable length; they have furnished material for an immense mass of modern literature. These romances, which belonged to the court, the castle, and the university, were gigantic fabrica

tions of the imagination; for the most part they move entirely in an unreal world. The Italian story-tellers, with Boccaccio at their head, exchanged the cloud land of pure fancy for the solid earth of real happenings, or of incidents which came within the range of possibility. But they were story-tellers, not novelists; their interest was in the story, not in the characters. The romances of Mlle. Scudéry, which were so widely read during the last half of the seventeenth, and the early part of the eighteenth century, were as extravagant and unreal as the romances of chivalry. "Le Grand Cyrus" fills two octavo volumes and abounds in improbabilities such as would have delighted Ariosto.

Side by side with these extravagant romances, which were the solace and resource of Church and State and Society, grew up a multitude of homely stories which were handed down from generation to generation among the com-mon people; stories which were often

coarse, but which dealt with real things and were full of satiric descriptions of persons, peculiarities, and idiosyncrasies; the first efforts to portray real life and to sketch character. The modern novel is the evolution of this popular story rather than of the romance which for centuries overshadowed it. In "Don Quixote," Cervantes united both stories: the element of romance in the Knight and the popular element in the Squire. "Gil Blas" was conceived in the satiric spirit of the popular tale. "Robinson Crusoe," published in 1719, was a story of incident, but it had the homeliness of interest, the directness and implicity of manner, the realistic method of the popular tale; so also had Richardson's "Pamela," which appeared in 1740, and from which it is customary to date the beginning of English fiction. For, in spite of its sentimentality, "Pamela " deals with what might have been an actual experience, and its heroine is a girl of humble origin and station. In