THE most important development in the recent history of the
English novel occurred in the last two decades of the nineteenth
century, when its writers became conscious of aesthetic con-
siderations, and fiction became a fine art. The early years of
the twentieth century were marked by a continuation of the
new æsthetic interest and the technical progress of the form.
They showed, however, a revulsion against the frivolity of the
nineties, a resumption of the serious social and philosophic
interests of the nineteenth century, with at once a more pene-
trating criticism and a lighter touch. Stereotypes of the Vic-
torians in matters of religious dogma, of social institutions such
as the family and the home, and of individual behavior, espe-
cially in sexual relations, were subject to a revaluation in which
the novelists bore a leading part.

The four novelists who give the Edwardian period a place in
literary history, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells,
and Joseph Conrad, all are critics of life, all in the tradition of
evolution interpret characters through environment, and all are
literary artists. With them must be considered Samuel Butler,
who in a single novel and a couple of Utopian romances in-
carnated the spirit of iconoclasm so aggressively that he and
his professed follower, Bernard Shaw, might claim the honor of
slaying the Victorian Era, if it had not been already dead.

Samuel Butler holds a place in the history of English fiction
by virtue of his Utopian romance Erewhon ( 1872) and a single
novel, The Way of All Flesh ( 1903) on which he worked for some

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