shown much more
fully in the Saints' Lives--best of all in the _Andreas_, no doubt, but
remarkably also (especially considering the slender amount of
"happenings") in the _Guthlac_ and the _Juliana_. In fact the very
fragments of Anglo-Saxon poetry, by a sort of approximation which they
show to dramatic narrative and which with a few exceptions is far less
present in the classics, foretell much more clearly and certainly than
in the case of some other foretellings which have been detected in them,
the future achievements of English literature in the department of
fiction. _The Ruin_ (the finest thing perhaps in all Anglo-Saxon) is a
sort of background study for something that might have been much better
than _The Last Days of Pompeii_: and _The Complaint of Deor_, in its
allusion to the adventures of the smith Weland and others, makes one
sorry that some one more like the historian of a later and decadent
though agreeable Wayland the Smith, had not told us the tale that is now
left untold. A crowd of fantastic imaginings or additions, to supply the
main substance, and a certain common-sense grasp of actual conditions
and circumstances to set them upon, and contrast them with--these are
the great requirements of Fiction in life and character. You must mix
prose and poetry to get a good romance or even novel. The consciences of
the ancients revolted from this mixture of kinds; but there was no such
revolt in the earlier moderns, and least of all in our own mediaeval
forefathers.

So few people are really acquainted with the whole range of Romance
(even in English), or with any large part of it, that one may without
undue presumption set down in part, if not in whole, to ignorance, a
doctrine and position which we must now attack. This is that romance and
novel are widely separated from each other; and that the historian of
the novel is really straying out of his ground if he meddles with
Romance. These are they who would make our proper subject begin with
Marivaux and Richardson, or at earliest with Madame de La Fayette, who
exclude Bunyan altogether, and sometimes go so far as to question the
right of entry to Defoe. But the counter-arguments are numerous: and any
one of them would almost suffice by itself. In the first place the idea
of the novel arising so late is unnatural and unhistorical: these
Melchisedecs without father or mother are not known in literature. In
the second a pedantic insistence on the exclusive de