A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 / From the Beginning to 1800

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In beginning what, if it ever gets finished, must in all probability be the last of some already perhaps too numerous studies of literary history, I should like to point out that the plan of it is somewhat different from that of most, if not all, of its predecessors. I have usually gone on the principle (which I still think a sound one) that, in studying the literature of a country, or in dealing with such general characteristics of parts of literature as prosody, or such coefficients of all literature as criticism, minorities are, sometimes at least, of as much importance as majorities, and that to omit them altogether is to risk, or rather to assure, an imperfect—and dangerously imperfect—product.
In another point, however, I have kept to my old ways, and that is the way of beginning at the beginning. I disagree utterly with any Balbus who would build an absolute wall between romance and novel, or a wall hardly less absolute between verse- and prose-fiction. I think the French have (what is not common in their language) an advantage over us in possessing the general term Roman , and I have perhaps taken a certain liberty with my own title in order to keep the noun-part of it to a single word. I shall extend the meaning of novel —that of roman would need no extension—to include, not only the prose books, old and new, which are more generally called romance, but the verse romances of the earlier period.
The subject is one with which I can at least plead almost lifelong familiarity. I became a subscriber to Rolandi's, I think, during my holidays as a senior schoolboy, and continued the subscriptions during my vacations when I was at Oxford. In the very considerable leisure which I enjoyed during the six years when I was Classical Master at Elizabeth College, Guernsey, I read more French than any other literature, and more novels than anything else in French. In the late 'seventies and early 'eighties, as well as more recently, I had to round off and fill in my knowledge of the older matter, for an elaborate account of French literature in the Encyclopædia Britannica , for a long series of articles on French novelists in the Fortnightly Review , and for the Primer and Short History of the subject which I wrote for the Clarendon Press; while from 1880 to 1894, as a Saturday Review er, I received, every month, almost everything notable (and a great deal hardly worth noting) that had appeared in France.