One endeavours to remember some one or two outstanding novels written by any one of the writers of this group. It must be at once admitted, one fails to recall a great novel. It is true that the great Victorians, Meredith and Hardy, were hard at work at this time; but, then, neither of these writers belongs to this movement. Then there was Kipling, Stevenson, Barrie, and George Moore. With the exception of the last, we have little to do with these here. They do not come within the scope of the present study. None of the men of the nineties (as I have defined them) produced a great novel. It would be well, however, to give at once some connotation for so loose a term as ‘a great novel.’ Let us then say that a good English novel is not necessarily a great novel; nor, for that matter, is a good Russian novel necessarily a great novel. A great novel is a work of fiction that has entered into the realm of universal literature in the same way as the dramas of Sophocles and Shakespeare and Molière have entered that glorious demesne. As a matter of fact, one can remember, I think in most cases, very few English novels that are great in this sense; while there are many more French and Russian works that have an undeniable right to this title. Therefore it is not, perhaps, so damaging a criticism of the period as it might at first sight appear to say it has produced no great novel. But in so far as English fiction alone is concerned, it cannot be said that the men of the nineties produced work of a very high order in this form. They do not seem to have had the staying power demanded in such artistic production. The short poem, the short story, the small black and white drawing, the one act play--in fact, any form of art that just displays the climacteric moment and discards the rest pleased them. It was, as John Davidson said, an age of Bovril. While the novel, it must be admitted, needs either a profusion of ideas, as in the case of the Russians, or of genitals, as in the case of the French. But the art of the nineties was essentially an expression of moods--and moods, after all, are such evanescent brief conditions. So it is not unnatural that the fruition of the novel was not rich among these writers. George Gissing and George Moore, in a way their forebears (I have in mind more particularly the latter), spread a taste for such works. Indeed, in his _Confessions of a Young Man_, George Moore may be said to have predicted the masculine type of the nineties. Gissing in 1891 was to daunt some with his _New Grub Street_, while Henry James was to inspire enthusiasm in a few like Hubert Crackanthorpe. But naturally in the way of stimulus the main goad was France, which was at that date phenomenally rich in practitioners of the art of the novel. The Vizetelly Zolas, Mr. George Moore personally conducting the novels of certain of the French novelists over the Channel, the desire to smash the fetters of Victorian fiction which Thomas Hardy was to