It is of course impossible to exhaust the topic of the English novel from Fielding to Henry James in a few paragraphs of a small book. But the topic of main currents of that literature is more easily got rid of simply because there are practically no main currents at all. There are some good writers, but of a Tradition practically no trace. The writers who spring most immediately to the imagination as being somewhere near in their works to the main stream of the international novel--for the Novel is after all an international affair--the most unforgettable writers of that type are two or three women. That I suppose is because, whilst the men ran about actively intent on proving that they were gentlemen or in improving the ungentle world, the women had to prove that they were not unladylike and so remained at home and looked at life, without any very immediate aim at publicity or even at publication. At any rate, if you take Miss Burney’s _Evelina_, Miss Edgeworth’s _Castle Rackrent_, Miss Austen’s _Sense and Sensibility_, Mrs. Gaskell’s _Mary Barton_, George Eliot’s _Scenes from Clerical Life_, and Miss Brontë’s _Villette_, you do get something of a kinship, if not much of a tradition, and if you add to them the _Barchester Towers_ series of Trollope and the works of Mark Rutherford and George Gissing you do get, too, some attempts at rendering English life that are above the attention of adults with the mentality of French boys of sixteen. At rendering, that is to say, rather than at the mere relating of a more or less arbitrary tale so turned as to ensure a complacent view of life and carried on by characters that as a rule are--six feet high and gliding two inches above the ground! That is, of course, an arbitrary generalization as to all the English nuvvles that string out from, say, Scott to, say, the late Marion Crawford. But if sweeping it is not _completely_ unfair. Obviously even Scott’s _Antiquary_ is worth consideration if one had the time, or _The Cloister and the Hearth_, or let us say _Lorna Doone_. That last work I read over twelve times when I was a boy and from the beginning: “If any man would hear a plain tale told plainly, I John Ridd of the parish of Oare” to the end; I dare say I could recite half the book to-day. But then Blackmore was a market-gardener! Let me lay on his altar these alms for oblivion, for I suppose that few people to-day read of the Doones of Badgeworthy or of how John Ridd took his Lorna home in the great snows. In short, if you omit Dickens and Thackeray as immense amateurs who wrote from time to time very admirable passages, and if you do not like the works--from _Evelina_ to _New Grub Street_--that I have mentioned in my last paragraph but two, the amount of work that you can read in English produced between 1799 and 1899 or so will seem extremely small--supposing you to be of any at all adult tastes or of any seriousness of approach to literary matters.