As we glance down the long history of literature, we cannot but remark
that certain literary forms, the novel at one time and the drama at
another, have achieved a sweeping popularity, seemingly out of all
proportion to their actual merit at the moment when they were
flourishing most luxuriantly. In these periods of undue expansion, the
prevalent form absorbed many talents not naturally attracted toward it.
In the beginning of the sixteenth century in England, for instance, the
drama was more profitable, and, therefore, more alluring, than any other
field of literary endeavor; and so it was that many a young fellow of
poetic temperament adventured himself in the rude theater of those
spacious days, even tho his native gift was only doubtfully dramatic. No
reader of Peele's plays and of Greene's can fail to feel that these two
gentle poets were, neither of them, born play-makers called to the stage
by irresistible vocation. Two hundred years later, after Steele and
Addison had set the pattern of the eighteenth-century essay, the drama
was comparatively neglected, and every man of letters was found striving
for the unattainable ease and charm of the 'Tatler' and the 'Spectator.'
Even the elephantine Johnson, congenitally incapable of airy nothings
and prone always to "make little fishes talk like whales," disported
ponderously in the 'Idler' and the 'Rambler.' The vogue of the essay was
fleeting also; and a century later it was followed by the vogue of the
novel,--a vogue which has already endured longer than that of the essay,
and which has not yet shown any signs of abating. Yet the history of
literature reminds us that the literary form most in favor in one
century is very likely to drop out of fashion in the next; and we are
justified in asking ourselves whether the novel is to be supreme in the
twentieth century as it was in the nineteenth, or whether its popularity
must surely wane like that of the essay.

Altho the art of fiction must be almost as old as mankind itself, the