* * * * * To collect the results of this long chapter, we may observe that in these three departments--Pastoral, Heroic, and Fairy--various important elements of _general_ novel material and construction are provided in a manner not yet noticed. The Pastoral may seem to be the most obsolete, the most of a mere curiosity. But the singular persistence and, in a way, universality of this apparently fossil convention has been already pointed out; and it is perhaps only necessary to shift the pointer to the fact that the novels with which one of the most modern, in perhaps the truest sense of that word, of modern novelists, though one of the eldest, Mr. Thomas Hardy, began to make his mark--_Under the Greenwood Tree_ and _Far from the Madding Crowd_--may be claimed by the pastoral with some reason. And it has another and a wider claim--that it keeps up, in its own way, the element of the imaginative, of the fanciful--let us say even of the unreal--without which romance cannot live, without which novel is almost repulsive, and which the increasing advances of realism itself were to render more than ever indispensable. As for the Heroic, we have already shown how much, with all its faults, it did for the novel generally in construction and in other ways. It has been shown likewise, it is hoped, how the Fairy story, besides that additional provision of imagination, fancy, and dream which has just been said to be so important--mingled with this a kind of realism which was totally lacking in the others, and which showed itself especially in one immensely important department wherein they had been so much to seek. Fairies may be (they are not to my mind) things that "do not happen"; but the best of these fairies are fifty times more natural, not merely than the characters of Scudery and Gomberville, but than those (I hold to my old blasphemy) of Racine. Animals may not talk; but the animals of Perrault and even of Madame d'Aulnoy talk divinely well, and, what is more, in a way most humanly probable and interesting. Never was there such a triumph of the famous impossible-probable as a good fairy story. Except to the mere scientist and to (of course, quite a different person) the unmitigated fool, these stories, at least the best of them, fully deserve the delightful phrase which Southey attributes to a friend of his. They are "necessary and voluptuous and right." They were, to the French eighteenth century and to French prose, almost what the ballad was to the English eighteenth century and to English verse; almost what the _Maerchen_ was to the prose and verse alike of yet un-Prussianised Germany. They were more than twice blessed: for they were charming in themselves; they exercised good influence on other literary productions; and they served as precious antidotes to bad things that they could not improve, and almost as precious alternatives to things good in themselves but of a different kind from theirs.