ays Stevenson, 'what is left upon the
memory by any powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated
and refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it, and yet something
as simple as nature. . . . The fact is, that art is working far ahead of
language as well as of science, realizing for us, by all manner of
suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no direct
name, for the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into
the necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that
often hangs about the purpose of a romance; it is clear enough to us in
thought, but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are able
to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been
sufficiently shaped to that end.' He goes on to point out that there is
an epical value about every great romance, an underlying idea, not
presentable always in abstract or critical terms, in the stories of such
masters of pure romance as Victor Hugo and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The progress of romance in the present century has consisted chiefly in
the discovery of new exercises of imagination and new subtle effects in
story. Fielding, as Stevenson says, did not understand that the nature
of a landscape or the spirit of the times could count for anything in a
story; all his actions consist of a few simple personal elements. With
Scott vague influences that qualify a man's personality begin to make a
large claim; 'the individual characters begin to occupy a comparatively
small proportion of that canvas on which armies manoeuvre and great hills
pile themselves upon each other's shoulders.' And the achievements of
the great masters since Scott--Hugo, Dumas, Hawthorne, to name only those
in Stevenson's direct line of ancestry--have added new realms to the
domain of romance.

What are the indescribable effects that romance, casting far beyond
problems of character and conduct, seeks to realise? What is the nature
of the great informing, underlying idea that animates a truly great
romance--_The Bride of Lammermoor_, _Monte Cristo_, _Les Miserables_,
_The Scarlet Letter_, _The Master of Ballantrae_? These questions can
only be answered by de-forming the impression given by each of these
works to present it in the chop-logic language of philosophy. But an
approach to an answer may be made by illustration.

In his _American Notebooks_ Nathaniel Hawthorne used to jot down subjects
for