ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. THE NEW YORK 839322 ASTOR, LENOX AND R 1918 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PREFACE THIS book is an attempt to trace the development of some important principles of fictional criticism during the two centuries of the novel in English, and to show how the development of these principles has in turn altered the shape of the modern novel. From the point of view here maintained, criticism is not only effect but also cause. Its ideas are indeed gradually evolved from what has been done, and of course from what has been poorly done or left undone; but they are with equal certainty gradually incorporated into what is being done, and this second half of the process is none the less significant for having been so largely neglected by the conventional critic and historian. Criticism is a forecast as well as a record, and a leverage for raising the standard as well as a standard held up. This endless cycle of interactions is what I have studied, in an effort to show how criticism itself is creative, and especially how both the critical and the creative forces of past generations come to focus in the latest definable stage of fiction, that of the late 19th century and the early 20th. I have tried to accomplish that purpose with a due recognition that this, or any, latest stage is itself but tentative and experimental. The novel as we have it is the past crystallizing; but, |