Of all the main forms into which the literary impulse moulds the stuff of imagination, the novel is the last to be devised.

The drama dates from prehistoric times, so does the epic, the ballad and the lyric.

The novel, as we know it, dates practically speaking from 1740.
What is the reason it is so late in appearing?
The answer is simply that there seems no room for good drama and good fiction at the same time in literature; drama and novels cannot exist side by side, and the novel had to wait for the decadence of the drama before it could appear and triumph.

If one were to make a table of succession for the various kinds of literature as they have been used naturally and spontaneously (not academically), the order would be the epic, the drama, the novel; and it would be obvious at once that the order stood for something more than chronological succession, and that literature in its function as a representation and criticism of life passed from form to form in the search of greater freedom, greater subtlety, and greater power.

At present we seem to be at the climax of the third stage in this development; there are signs that the fourth is on the way, and that it will be a return to drama, not to the old, formal, ordered kind, but, something new and freer, ready to gather up and interpret what there is of newness and freedom in the spirit of man and the society in which he lives.
The novel, then, had to wait for the drama's decline, but there was literary story-telling long before that.