In the first third of the nineteenth century English fiction stood at the parting of the ways. Should it follow Scott and the romance, or Jane Austen and the Novel of everyday life? Should it adopt that form of story-making which puts stress on action and plot and is objective in its method, roaming all lands and times for its material; or, dealing with the familiar average of contemporary society, should it emphasize character analysis and choose the subjective realm of psychology for its peculiar domain? The pen dropped from the stricken hand of Scott in 1832; in that year a young parliamentary reporter in London was already writing certain lively, closely observed sketches of the town, and four years later they were to be collected and published under the title of "Sketches by Boz," while the next year that incomparable extravaganza, "The Pickwick Papers," was to go to an eager public. English fiction had decided: the Novel was to conquer the romance for nearly a century. It was a victory which to the present day has been a dominant influence in story-making; establishing a tendency which, until Stevenson a few years since, with the gaiety of the inveterate boy, cried up Romance once more, bade fair to sweep all before it. Before tracing this vigorous development of the Novel of Reality with Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot (to name three great leaders), it is important to get an idea of the growth on French soil which was so deeply influential upon English as well as upon other modern fiction. Nothing is more certain in literary evolution than the fact that the French Novel in the nineteenth century has molded and defined modern fiction, thus repaying an earlier debt owed the English pioneers, Richardson and Fielding. English fiction of our own generation may be described as a native variation on a French model: in fact, the fictionists of Europe and the English-speaking lands, with whatever divergencies personal or national, have derived in large measure from the Gaul the technique, the point of view and the choice of theme which characterizes the French Novel from Stendhal to Balzac, from Zola to Guy de Maupassant. I The name of Henri Beyle, known to literature under the sobriquet of Stendhal, has a meaning in the development of the modern type of fiction out of proportion to the intrinsic value of his stories. He was, of course, far surpassed by mightier followers like Balzac, Flaubert and Zola; yet his significance lies in the very fact that they were followers. His is all the merit pertaining to the feat of introducing the Novel of psychic analysis: of that persistent and increasingly unpleasant bearing-down upon the darker facts of personality. Hence his "Rouge et Noir," dated 1830 and typical of his aim and method, is in a sense an epoch-making book.