No rules that have so far been laid down about the requirements of fiction are final or from the reader’s point of view of great assistance. Some of us have made up our minds that the English novel is growing more shapely and well constructed: Mr. W. D. Howells, for instance, by precept and practice, and some other novelists and critics who are under the influence of French fiction, insist on construction and form and simplicity of plot. Then in spite of all “tendencies” and rules of fiction, along comes Mr. William De Morgan with three novels which might have been written fifty years ago, and wins instantaneous and deserved success as a new novelist--at the age of seventy. His plots are as wayward and leisurely as most of Thackeray’s, his people are human, and his discursive individual style is as fresh as if novelists had not been filling the world with books for two centuries. “Joseph Vance” and “Alice-for-Short” prove how inconsiderate genius is of rules made by critics and how far is the “old-fashioned” novel from having gone stale and fallen on evil days. So long as a plot has vitality of some kind, truth to life, or ingenuity, or dramatic power, it makes no difference to the mere reader what material the novelist chooses. Twenty years ago there was a strange contest between realists and romanticists. The realists, or as they sometimes call themselves, “naturalists,” take the simpler facts of common life and weave them into stories. The romanticist selects from highly colored epochs of history, or from no-man’s land, or from the more unusual circumstances of actual life, such startling adventures, such well-joined incidents, such mysteries, surprises, and dramatic revelations as we do not meet with in ordinary times and places. Thackeray is a romanticist in “Henry Esmond,” a realist in “Pendennis” and “The Newcomes.” Scott’s novels are romantic. Those of Trollope, of Mr. Henry James, of Mr. W. D. Howells are realistic. There is no sharp line between the two. Dickens found extraordinary romance in ordinary London streets, which he knew with journalistic realism to the last brick and cobblestone. In “Bleak House,” he says, he “purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things.” But, though he may have considered this book a special quest for the romantic in real life, it does not differ in the kind or the proportion of its romanticism from a dozen others of his novels. It is no more romantic than “David Copperfield” or “The Old Curiosity Shop,” no less romantic than the historical fiction, “A Tale of Two Cities.” His imagination penetrated life, real or unreal, familiar or remote, and found it rich with plot and subplot; he touched the slums with his mythmaker’s wand, and in obedience to his touch the children of the streets and dark tenements became heroes of strange adventure, moving through mysteries as varied and wonderful as fairyland.