d’Annunzio, æsthetic exegeses, lyric descriptions, and the history of art. It is too much. The novel should be a novel; that is, a narrative of strange and curious events, a story of unusual happenings. The novel of adventure is the only genuine, legitimate novel. Let him who wants the history of art write books on the history of art; let him who wants religion write on theology; let him who wants psychology turn to psychological studies and manuals. Why should the novel, the very type that has least right to bore the reader, be compelled to serve as the receptacle, the vehicle, the substitute for all these other sciences, arts, and disciplines, beautiful in themselves, no doubt, most worthy and most useful, but utterly unrelated to romance? There is no psychologizing in the Tristan, the best and most popular novel of the Middle Ages. The favorite novel of modern times, the Don Quixote, is wholly a story of adventure, and does not pause for the analysis of souls. The first European novel, the Odyssey, is an unbroken sequence of events, without a trace of introspection. The department-store novel is a discovery of modern times. The novel which seeks to inform, instead of bringing pleasure, is an outcome of the corruption of the genre. The knowing, overladen, mixed and composite novel is faithless to its ancestry and its purposes. The great narrators—let us say Boccaccio and Maupassant, to keep
