death in 1898, were actual romances--written in a kind of modernised
fifteenth-century English, and dealing, some with far back incidents of
the conflict between Romans and "Barbarians," most with the frank
no-time and no-place of Romance itself. They came at an unfortunate
moment, when the younger generation of readers were thinking it proper
to be besotted with crude realism or story-less impressionism, and when
some at least of those who might have welcomed them earlier had left
their first faith in poetry or poetic prose. There was, moreover,
perhaps some genuine dislike, and certainly a good deal of precisian
condemnation, of the "Wardour Street" dialect. Yet there was no sham in
them: it was impossible for Mr. Morris to have anything to do with
shams--even his socialism was not that--and they were in reality a
revival, however Rip van Winklish it might seem, of the pure old romance
itself, at the hands of a nineteenth-century sorcerer, who no doubt put
a little of the nineteenth century into them. The best--probably the
best of all is _The Well at the World's End_ (1896)--have an
extraordinary charm for any one who can taste romance: and are by no
means unlikely to awake the taste for it in generations to come. But for
the present the thing lay out of the way of its generation, and was not
comprehended or enjoyed thereby. For it is no doubt nearly as annoying
to have bread given to you when you want thistles as to have thistles
given to you when you want bread. But just as the ballad is the
appointed reviver of poetry, so is romance the appointed reviver of
prose-fiction: and in one form or another it will surely do its work,
sooner or later.

Here it may be best to stop the actual current of critical comment on
individuals. Something has been hinted as to the general present
condition of the novel, but there is no need to emphasise it or to enter
into particulars about it: indeed, even if such a proceeding were