ooner or later, demand to be shown. His fiction, whether we
award it the somewhat grudging recognition of Carlyle or with
Ruskin regard its maker as the one great novelist of English
race, must be deemed a precious legacy, one of literature's most
honorable ornaments--especially desirable in a day so apparently
plain and utilitarian as our own, eschewing ornament and
perchance for that reason needing it all the more.

CHAPTER VII

FRENCH INFLUENCE

In the first third of the nineteenth century English fiction
stood at the parting of the ways. Should it follow Scott and the
romance, or Jane Austen and the Novel of everyday life? Should
it adopt that form of story-making which puts stress on action
and plot and is objective in its method, roaming all lands and
times for its material; or, dealing with the familiar average of
contemporary society, should it emphasize character analysis and
choose the subjective realm of psychology for its peculiar
domain? The pen dropped from the stricken hand of Scott in 1832;
in that year a young parliamentary reporter in London was
already writing certain lively, closely observed sketches of the
town, and four years later they were to be collected and
published under the title of "Sketches by Boz," while the next
year that incomparable extravaganza, "The Pickwick Papers," was
to go to an eager public. English fiction had decided: the Novel
was to conquer the romance for nearly a century. It was a
victory which to the present day has been a dominant influence
in story-making; establishing a tendency which, until Stevenson
a few years since, with the gaiety of the inveterate boy, cried
up Romance once more, bade fair to sweep all before it.

Before tracing this vigorous development of the Novel of Reality
with Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot (to name three great leaders),
it is important to get an idea of the growth on French soil
which was so deeply influential upon English as well as upon
other modern fiction. Nothing is more certain in literary
evolution than the fact that the French Novel in the nineteenth
century has molded and defined modern fiction, thus repaying an
earlier debt owed the English pioneers, Richardson and Fielding.
English fiction of our own generation may be described as a
native variation on a French model: in fact, the fictionists of
Europe and the English-speaking lands, with whatever
divergencies personal or national, have derived in large measure
fro