[Illustration: ARCHIBALD MARSHALL] ARCHIBALD MARSHALL _A Realistic Novelist_ BY WILLIAM LYON PHELPS Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale WITH FRONTISPIECE [Illustration] NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1919 COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC. TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO NOTABLE FOR SCHOLARS AND TEACHERS AND TWO CREATIVE ARTISTS THE NOVELIST ROBERT HERRICK THE POET WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY PREFACE The original form of this book was a lecture on the William Vaughn Moody foundation at the University of Chicago, delivered on the sixth of February, 1918. A portion of it was subsequently printed in the _North American Review_. It now appears considerably revised and enlarged. W. L. P. _Yale University, Tuesday, 21 May, 1918._ ARCHIBALD MARSHALL On a mellow day in the early autumn of the year 1900, I sat on an old wooden bench in the open air with an English gentleman, and listened to his conversation with a mixture of curiosity and reverence. The place was one of the fairest counties of England, the town on the other side of a screen of trees was Dorchester, and my seat-mate was Thomas Hardy. I remember his saying without any additional emphasis than the weight of the words, that the basis of every novel should be a story. In considering this remark, which came, not from a doctrinaire, but from a master of long and triumphant experience, I could not help thinking that what seems axiomatic is often belied by a majority of instances. Thus, we church-members would agree that religion must take the first place in our lives; yet a disinterested observer, who should begin at the other end of the proposition and examine our lives merely to discover what actually did take the first place therein, might conceivably miss the element of religion altogether. In the same way, while it would theoretically seem that every novel must be a story, an honest critic who should examine the total product of prose fiction for any given year in the twentieth century, might, in a large number of cases, easily fail to find any story at all.