John O. Miller

December 1914.

CONTENTS

NOVELS OF ADVENTURE AND MANNERS[1]
ENGLISH LETTER-WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY[34]
THACKERAY[76]
THE ANGLO-INDIAN NOVELIST[121]
HEROIC POETRY[155]
THE WORKS OF LORD BYRON[177]
THE ENGLISH UTILITARIANS[210]
CHARACTERISTICS OF MR. SWINBURNE'S POETRY[263]
FRONTIERS ANCIENT AND MODERN[291]
L'EMPIRE LIBÉRAL[328]
SIR SPENCER WALPOLE[368]
REMARKS ON THE READING OF HISTORY[377]
RACE AND RELIGION[399]
THE STATE IN ITS RELATION TO EASTERN AND WESTERN RELIGIONS[427]
INDEX[454]

NOVELS OF ADVENTURE AND MANNERS[2]

Mr. Raleigh[3] very rightly goes back to mediæval romance for the origins of English fiction. In all countries the metrical tale is many generations older than the prose story; for prose writing is a refinement of the literary art which flourishes only when reading has become popular; while verse, being at first a kind of memoria technica used for the correct transmission of sacred texts and the heroic tradition, strikes the ear and fixes the recollection of an audience. The exploits of mighty warriors and the miracles of saints—love, fighting, and theology—form the subject matter of these stories in verse. They are, as Mr. Raleigh says, epical in spirit though not in form: 'they carry their hero through the actions and adventures of his life ... they display a marked preference for deeds done, and attempt no character-drawing.... A sense of the instability of human life, very present to the minds of men familiar with battle and plague, is everywhere mirrored in these romances.' Then came Chaucer, who not only wrote prose tales, but also carried far toward perfection the art of narration in verse; and 'in the fifteenth century both of the ancestors of the modern novel—that is, the novella or short pithy story after the manner of the Italians, and the romance of chivalry—appear in an English prose dress.' But the genius of English fiction was still loaded with the chains of allegory and pedantic moralisation; and in the Gesta Romanorum, the most popular collection of English prose stories which had been translated from the Latin at the end of the fifteenth century, 'human beings are mere puppets, inhabiting the great fabric of mediæval thought and mediæval institution.... It was the work of the Renaissance to recover the literal and obvious sense of human life, as it was the work of the closely-allied Reformation to recover the literal sense of the Bible.'