Novel

The present century has seen the sustained work of one dis tinguished successor to Howells and James, Edith Wharton. Of the novelists in mid-career the most important are James Branch Cabell, ironic romanticist, Joseph Hergesheimer, who writes a compound of romanticism and naturalism, Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, naturalists, Sinclair Lewis, a mordant journ alist with a gift for critical narrative, and \Villa Cather, the most distinguished expositor of the retreating frontier which was con quered and populated in the closing years of the 19th century.

(P. H. B.) Spain.—Prose narrative in Spain practically begins in the 15th century with chronicles and romances of chivalry, tempered oc casionally and faintly by some knowledge of what had been at tempted in Italy by Boccaccio. The Spanish version of Amadis de Gaula, in which the romance of knight errantry culminated, be longs to 1508; the lost original is supposed to have been Portu guese. This was the only book of its class which is saved from the burning in Don Quixote ; it was followed by Palmerin of Eng land. These interminable books and a hundred worse than they, occupied the leisure of i6th century readers of both sexes. With out approaching the form of novels, they prepared the ground for novel-reading. The exploration of America led to the composition of monstrous tales of the New World, which generally took the form of continuations of Amadis. A new thing was begun in when the anonymous picaresque romance of Lazarillo de Tormes started the story of fantastic modern adventure; this highly enter taining book has been called the i6th century Pickwick, and Fitz maurice-Kelly remarks that it "fixed for ever the type of the comic prose epic." The pastoral romance, in the hands of Jorge de Montemayor (d. 1560, who wrote an insipid Diana which was popular for a while throughout Europe, took readers a step back ward, away from the ultimate path of the novel. It is of interest to us, however, to note that it was in one of these "vain imagin ings," in his pastoral romance of Galatea, that Cervantes ap proached the field of fiction in 1585. Few of his peculiar merits are to be found in this early work; he turned for the present to the composition of plays. It was not until 1604 that he returned to prose fiction by printing his immortal Don Quixote, which made an epoch in the history of the novel. This book was originally in tended to ridicule the already fading passion for the romances of chivalry, but it proceeded much further than that, and there is hardly any branch of fiction which may not be traced back to the splendid initiation of some chapter of Don Quixote. In 1613 Cervantes published his 12 Exemplary Novels; these are not so well known as the great romance, and they owed not a little of their form to Italian sources, but they are very brilliant. One of the best anonymous Spanish stories of the period, The Mock Aunt, is a type of excellence in facetious narrative of the sarcastic class; it has been attributed to Cervantes himself. No other

novelist of Spain has moulded the thought of Europe, but the heroic romance which occupied so much of the attention of France in the 17th century was invented by a little-known Spanish soldier, Perez de Hita, who, about i600, wrote fantastic stories about Granada and the Moors. The farcical romance of Fray Gerundio de Campazas, 1758, by J. F. de Isla (1703-18) competed in popularity with Gil Bias. Speaking broadly, however, Spain made no appreciable progress in novel-writing from the days of Cer vantes to those of Walter Scott, when the Waverley Novels began to find such artless imitators as Martinez de la Rosa and Zorilla. But the first original novelist of Spain was Cecilia Bohl de Faber (Fernan Caballero) (1796-1877), whose La Gaviota (1848), a study of life in an Andalusian village, was the earliest Spanish novel, in the modern sense. She was followed by Valera (1824– 1904), by Alarcon (1833-91), by Pereda (1834-1906), by Perez Ga.id& (1845-1920) and by Palacio Valdes (b. 1853), in whom the tendencies of recent European fiction have been competently illustrated without any striking contributions to originality.

Germany.

The cultivation of the novel in its proper sense began late in Germany. It is usual to consider that H. J. C. von Grimmelshausen (1625?-75) as the earliest German novelist; his very curious romance, Abenteuerliche Simplicius Simplicissimus, was printed at Mompelgard in 1669. This is an account of the ad ventures of a simple-minded fellow during the Thirty Years' War, and is a chain of episodes, brilliantly recorded, but hardly a novel. Early in the i8th century, an extraordinary number of imitations of Defoe's great romance were published in Germany, and these are known to scholars as the Robinsonaden. Later on, Wieland imitated Don Quixote, but the earliest German novel which possesses original value is the celebrated work of Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). The still more celebrated Wilhelm Meister did not appear until 1796. A third novel, Elec tive Affinities, was published by Goethe in 1809. Meanwhile a very characteristic group of picturesque stories had been issued by Johann Paul Richter (Jean Paul) (1763-1825), destined to have a wide influence upon romantic literature throughout Europe. Purely romantic were the stories of Tieck, of Brentano, of Arnim, of Fouque, of Kleist, of Immermann. The German novelists of this period wrote like poets, deprived of the discipline of verse. In later times novels of high merit have been written by Gustav Freytag, Wilibald Alexis ( I798-1871), called the German Walter Scott, Laube, Fontane, Ebers, Jeremias Gotthelf, Berthold Auer bach, Spielhagen, Heyse and many others, but the 19th century produced no German novelist of commanding originality.