the Victorian novel by showing the different kinds of treatment
it accorded to one special subject through the changing fashions
of two generations. I have covered only the novels of contem-
porary manners which reflect the Oxford Movement, and only
in so far as they reflect the Movement. ¹ The most important
historical novels written in that period have been added be-
cause they contribute to our knowledge of the currents of
thought in the nineteenth century itself. Another word as to
limits: I have seldom given synopses. The mere story is usually
for our present purposes unimportant. A synopsis is often a
bore, and not even an instructive bore, for it bears about as
much relation to the work of art as the description of a block
of marble might bear to a statue. Where I have sketched the
plot, it is because this has some significance per se. Frequently,
the only thing of interest to us in a character is one of his re-
marks--it would be impossible to tell about his birth and child-
hood, who married him and why her father did not want her
to, and how this virtuous unfortunate finally inherited an estate
and became a gentleman.

Sometimes I have had to work as a pioneer. Even bibliog-
raphies are lacking, and occasionally it was necessary to work
out for myself methods that tradition would have supplied for
the elder periods or for the better-studied literary genres. More-
over, scholarship is mere pedantry until it offers tentative
conclusions, for only generalizations can be used in thinking.
But the very subject-matter of humanistic research forces us to
base our generalizations, always, on incomplete material. The
result is a map drawn on the basis of what can be descried of
a broken landscape. We can only lay down a rough path which
may later be improved or perhaps abandoned.

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