ed its
full expansion and succeeded in winning recognition as the heir of the
epic and the rival of the drama. This victory was the direct result of
the overwhelming success of the Waverley novels and of the countless
stories written more or less in accordance with Scott's formula, by
Cooper, by Victor Hugo and Dumas, by Manzoni, and by all the others
who followed in their footsteps in every modern language. Not only
born story-tellers but writers who were by natural gift poets or
dramatists, seized upon the novel as a form in which they could
express themselves freely and by which they might hope to gain a
proper reward in money as well as in fame. The economic interpretation
of literary history has not received the attention it deserves; and
the future investigator will find a rich field in his researches for
the causes of the expansion of the novel in the nineteenth century
simultaneous with the decline of the drama in the literature of almost
every modern language except French.

As the nineteenth century drew toward its maturity, the influence of
Balzac reinforced the influence of Scott; and realism began to assert
its right to substitute itself for romance. The adjustment of
character to its appropriate background, the closer connection of
fiction with the actual facts of life, the focussing of attention on
the normal and the usual rather than on the abnormal and the
exceptional--all these steps in advance were more easily taken in the
freer form of the novel than they could be in the more restricted
formula of the drama; and for the first time in its history
prose-fiction found itself a pioneer, achieving a solidity of texture
which the theatre had not yet been able to attain.

The novel revealed itself at last as a fit instrument for applied
psychology, for the use of those delicate artists who are interested
rather in what character is than in what it may chance to do. In
the earliest fictions, whether in prose or verse, the hero had been
merely a type, little more than a lay-figure capable of violent
attitudes, a doer of deeds who, as Professor Gummere has explained,
"answered the desire for poetic expression at a time when an
individual is merged in the clan." And as the realistic writers
perfected their art, the more acute readers began to perceive that
the hero who is a doer of deeds can represent only the earlier stages
of culture which we have long outgrown. This hero came to be
recognized as an anachr