As a matter of fact, when you have excogitated two or more human beings out of your own head and have set them to work in the narrative (not the dramatic) way, you have made the novel _in posse_, if not _in esse_, from its apparently simplest development, such as _Daphnis and Chloe_, to its apparently most complex, such as the _Kreutzer Sonata_ or the triumphs of Mr.Meredith.You have started the "Imitation"-- the "fiction"-- and _tout est la_.

The ancients could do this in the dramatic way admirably, though on few patterns; in the poetical way as admirably, but again not on many.

The Middle Ages lost the dramatic way almost entirely, but they actually improved the poetical on its narrative side, and the result was Romance.

In every romance there is the germ of a novel and more; there is at least the suggestion and possibility of romance in every novel that deserves the name.

In the Tristram story and the Lancelot cycle there are most of the things that the romancer of incident and the novelist of character and motive can want or can use, till the end of the world; and Malory (that "mere compiler" as some pleasantly call him) has put the possibilities of the latter and greater creation so that no one who has eyes can miss them.