d as this whole book
endeavours to be a history of a kind, remarks on subdivisions of that
kind as such can hardly be regarded as inopportune or inconsistent.

[Sidenote: Appearance of new classes--the historical.]

Now it is impossible that anybody who is at all inclined or accustomed
to think about the characteristics of the pleasure he receives from
literature, should not have noticed in this period the fact--beside and
outside of the other fact of a provision of delectable novelists--of a
great splitting up and (as scientific slang would put it) fissiparous
generation of the the classes of novel. It is, indeed, open to the
advocates or generic or specific criticism--though I think they cannot
possibly maintain their position as to poetry--to urge that a great deal
of harm was done to the novel, or at least that its development was
unnecessarily retarded, by the absence of this division earlier. And in
particular they might lay stress on the fortunes and misfortunes of the
historical element. That element had at least helped to start--and had
largely provided the material of--the earlier verse-romances and stories
generally; but the entire absence of criticism at the time had merged
it, almost or altogether, in mere fiction. It had played, as we saw, a
great part in the novels of the seventeenth century; but it had for the
most part merely "got in the way" of its companion ingredients and in
its own. I have admitted that there are diversities of opinion as to its
value in the _Astree_; but I hold strongly to my own that it would be
much better away there. I can hardly think that any one, uninfluenced by
the sillier, not the nobler, estimate of the classics, can think that
the "heroic" novels gain anything, though they may possibly not lose
very much, by the presence in them of Cyrus and Clelia, Arminius and
Candace, Roxana and Scipio. But perhaps the most fruitful example for
consideration is _La Princesse de Cleves_. Here, small as is the total
space, there is a great deal of history and a crowd, if for the most
part mute, of historical persons. But not one of these has the very
slightest importance in the story; and the Prince and the Princess and
the Duke--we may add the Vidame--who are the only figures that _have_
importance, might be the Prince and Princess of Kennaquhair, the Duke of
Chose, and the Vidame of Gonesse, in any time or no time since the
creation of the world, while retaining their fullest power of