But its popularity, especially when taken in connection with the still surviving distrust of fiction, is valuable.

It involves not merely the principle that "the devil shall not have all the best tunes," but the admission that this tune is good.
This point, and that other also frequently mentioned and closely connected with it, that the novel at this time overflows into almost every conceivable department of subject and object, are the main facts of a general historical kind, which should be in the reader's mind as the upshot of this chapter.

But there is a third, almost as important as either, and that is the almost universal coming short of complete success--the lack of consummateness, the sense that if the Novel Israel is not exactly still in the wilderness, it has not yet crossed the Jordan.

Even if we take in the last chapter, and its comparative giants, with the present and its heroes, ordinary folk, and pygmies, we shall scarcely find more than one great master, Fielding, and one little masterpiece, _Vathek_, deserving the adjective "consummate." No doubt the obvious explanation--that the hour was not because the man had not come except in this single case--is a good one: but it need not be left in the bare isolation of its fatalism.

There are at least several subsidiary considerations which it is well to advance.