Excerpt from The Development of the English Novel

The terms 'romance' and 'novel, ' which in them selves are a summary of the two conflicting aims in fiction, require at the outset brief historical and de scriptive definition. The former is in English the older word, being in common use as early as the fourteenth century. Our writers then meant first of all by the romance 8. Highly idealized verse-narrative of adventure or love translated from the French, that is, from a romance language; they also extended the term to similar stories derived from classic and other sources, or of their own invention. For a verse narrative approaching closer to the manners of real life -its intrigues and jealousies, - the Provencal poets had employed the word novas (always plural); for a like narrative in prose, always short, Boccaccio and his contemporaries were using the cognate word novella. Of stories of this realistic content, many were written in English in the fourteenth century, but they were called tales, -a word of elastic con notation, which Chaucer made to comprehend nearly all the different kinds of verse-stories current in his tune.

During the two centuries following Boccaccio the Italians continued to compose books of novelle, and in very great numbers. In the age of Elizabeth they came into English 111 shoals, and with them the word 'novel, ' as applicable to either the translation or an imitation. It was a particularly felicitous make-believe designation, for it conveyed the notion that the inci dents and the treatment were new. It however had a hard struggle to maintain itself, for the Elizabethans preferred to it the word 'history, ' which they applied to all manner of fictions in verse and prose, as may be seen from such titles as 'the Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet' and 'the History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.' This, too, was a happy desig nation, for it implied a pretended faithfulness to fact. Richardson and Fielding, after some vacilla tion, settled upon the word 'history for their fictions, though they both refer to them as novels. From the invention of printing down to this time the word 'romance, ' by which our mediaeval writers denoted ad ventures in verse or in prose, had not been common in the titles and the prefaces of English fictions, though many romances had been written. But when in the last half of the eighteenth century wild and supernatural stories came into fashion, the word was often placed upon title-pages. At this time Clara Reeve, in an exceedingly pleasant group of dialogues, drew the line of distinction between the romance and the novel. She says in 'the Progress of Romance'

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