Arrived at that particular five-cornered plot in the territory of the Novel I have foreshadowed the end of this small monograph. For, having traced the gradual course of the development from Apuleius to Joseph Conrad, having followed it from the Rome of Petronius Arbiter to the Spain of Lope da Vega, to the London of Defoe and Richardson, to the Paris of Diderot, Stendhal, and Flaubert--with side glances at the Cockaigne of Thackeray and Dickens and the Russia of Turgenev, Dostoieffsky and Tchekov--and back again to the London of Conrad, Henry James, and Stephen Crane--which last two writers America will not whole-heartedly accept as American, whilst England won’t accept them at all--having followed the devious course of the thin stream of development of the novel from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay, from the Bay of Biscay to the Port of London and so backwards and forwards across the English Channel, I shall leave it and you with a bump and with some regret at the gateway to the Middle-West--say at about Altoona. For it is there that the Novel, throughout the Ages the poor Cinderella of the Arts, is nowadays erecting itself into the sole guide and monitor of the world. I should like to have allowed myself to say a few words about the modern Middle-Western development, which is for the moment the final stage, of the art to whose furtherance I have obscurely devoted my half-century of existence. But I am condemned like Moses only to perceive that Promised Land. This is a monograph on the English Novel--which includes _The House of the Seven Gables_ or _What Maisie Knew_, not on the Middle-Western Novel of to-day which very emphatically doesn’t include--oh, say _Riceyman Steps_ and _Mr. Britling Sees it Through_. I should like to observe for the benefit of the Lay Reader, to whom I am addressing myself--for the Professional Critic will pay no attention to anything that I say, contenting himself with cutting me to pieces with whips of scorpions for having allowed my head to pop up at all--to the Lay Reader I should like to point out that what I am about to write is highly controversial and that he must take none of it too much _au pied de la lettre_. I don’t mean to say that it will not be written with almost ferocious seriousness. But what follows are suggestions not dictates, for in perusing this sort of book the reader must be prepared to do a great deal of the work himself--within his own mind.