east contented herself with ordinary, or
not very extraordinary, modern life. But the greatest things they did,
from the historian's point of view, were introductions of the novel to
new fields of exercise and endeavour. Art and religion were brought into
its sphere, and if _Les Natchez_ and _Les Martyrs_ cannot exactly be
called modern historical novels, they are considerable advances, both
upon the model of _Telemaque_ and upon that of _Belisaire_. And even
putting this aside, the whole body of Chateaubriand's work, as well as
not a little in Madame de Stael's, tended to introduce and to encourage
the spirit of Romance.

Now the proposition which--though never, I trust, pushed to the
unliterary extent of warping the judgment, and never yet, I hope, unduly
flaunted or flourished in the reader's face--dominates this volume, is
that Romanticism, or, to use the shorter and more glorious name,
Romance, itself dominates the whole of the French nineteenth-century
novel. If any one considers that this proposition is at variance with
the other, that the main function of the novel during the period has
been to bring the novel closer to ordinary life, he has failed to grasp
what it might be presumptuous plumply to call the true meaning of
Romance, but what is certainly that meaning as it has always appeared to
me.

To attempt discussion, or even enumeration, of all the definitions or
descriptions of Romance in general which have been given by others would
not only be impossible in the space at command, but would be really
irrelevant. As it happens, the matter can be cut short, without
inadequacy and without disingenuousness, by quoting a single pair of
epithets, affixed by a critic, for whom I have great respect, a day or
two before I wrote these words. This critic held that Romantic
treatment--in stage matters more particularly, but we can extend the
phrase to fiction without unfairness--was "generous but false." _I_
should call it "generous" certainly, but before all things "true." Nor
is this a mere play upon the words of the original. It so happens that
our friend the enemy has supplied a most admirable help. Legally, as we
know, veracity requires "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth." I admit that the last clause will not fit Romance. She does give
us something more than the truth, and that is her generosity, but it is
a generosity which is necessitated by the fact that Romance is a quality
or function n