In a complete and organised type of novel, episodes usher in one another and grow out of one another, luring the reader to a prepared climax, each carrying the architecture of the whole a step further, and all conspiring to produce an event to which the whole novel is tending. Such a novel comes to the reader as a process unfolding itself, a theme being worked out. In the looser type of fiction that _The Cloister and the Hearth_ represents, things follow one another in a chain, and find their unity in the fact that they all happen to the same person; so that the novel shapes itself round the hero, rather than into a theme. But in the episodical novel it is not any unifying theme that is the nucleus of the story, nor is it any particular character, but it is the “episode.” Each chapter is in a way a fresh inspiration and has its source in an isolated historical fact. History supplies not so much a run of narrative for the whole novel, as unrelated episodes which fiction may fasten together, but which stand alone in their original historical setting. The whole method of taking narrative itself straight from the history-book, in spite of its pointedness in reproducing definite incidents that actually happened, has its limitations in the fragmentary nature of history itself, or, at least, of the history that deals with the personal human things of story-interest. That history can only reach to episodes as a general rule, so it is in danger of producing something that is not a novel at all but a series of imaginative excursions into the past, a collection of historical “sketches.” The conflict of loyalties in historical fiction is seen here. A historical novel can not be made up of history that is picked out in snatches, and of this alone. A collection of episodes is disjointed narrative. It may be fused into running story by the imagination and the inventions of an author; or it may still remain in broken narrative, yet find a different unity in a novel that is something more than a narration. But in either event fiction must help out history. * * * * * The achievement of Dumas is sufficient to show what can be done in a novel that is above all things a narrative. Dumas did not merely set his novels in history and weave his stories around men who actually lived; he took actual situations and events, incident and action from history; and his greatness lies in the fact that he did not reproduce these in a broken episodic fashion, putting each in its own frame, and on a separate canvas, he did not merely patch them into fictions of his own and sprinkle them in his works, but he worked them in with his imagined episodes into a thread of running story.