Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/212

202 in prose, finds its central interest, not in individual personality or the passion of love, but in some great national or racial issue. The romances of the Middle Ages, though usually centering in the fortunes of individuals and often dealing with love, are superficial in treatment, loose in construction, and primarily interesting as marvelous adventure. The fabliaux of the same period, which, with the novelle of the Renaissance, belong to the ancestry of the short story of the modern magazine, are concerned with single situations, and do not attempt to display a whole phase of life in its subtlety and complexity. All these forms contain, in the imaginative nature of their material, an element common to them and the novel; but the negative statements which have been made regarding each show how much they fall short or go beyond our modern conception of prose fiction.

Yet, though differing in these important and often fundamental respects from the modern novel, these earlier varieties of imaginative narratives contributed in a number of ways to the making of the type dominant to-day. In the sixteenth century, for instance, we find appearing, first in Spain and then in England, the so-called picaresque novel, a story told in the first person by a roguish servant, who passes from master to master and exposes both his own rascality and the seamy side of the more fashionable life of his time. Many of the episodes are of the kind narrated in the fabliaux and novelle, but they are strung together by the history of the rogue hero. This type has persisted with variations, especially the loss of the servant element, down to our own time, and reached its highest pitch of art in English in Thackeray's "Barry Lyndon."

The Elizabethan romance, represented by such a work as Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia," is in respect of realism much farther from our novel than the picaresque tale. But in its abundance of sentiment and frequency of moral purpose, it has elements which the novel of roguery lacked. Characterization, which so far had rarely