There is nothing in which the Anglo-Saxon world differs more from the
world of the Continent of Europe than in its fiction. English readers
are accustomed to satisfy their curiosity with English novels, and it
is rarely indeed that we turn aside to learn something of the interior
life of those other countries the exterior scenery of which is often so
familiar to us. We climb the Alps, but are content to know nothing of
the pastoral romances of Switzerland. We steam in and out of the
picturesque fjords of Norway, but never guess what deep speculation
into life and morals is made by the novelists of that sparsely peopled
but richly endowed nation. We stroll across the courts of the Alhambra,
we are listlessly rowed upon Venetian canals and Lombard lakes, we
hasten by night through the roaring factories of Belgium; but we never
pause to inquire whether there is now flourishing a Spanish, an
Italian, a Flemish school of fiction. Of Russian novels we have lately
been taught to become partly aware, but we do not ask ourselves whether
Poland may not possess a Dostoieffsky and Portugal a Tolstoi.
Yet, as a matter of fact, there is no European country that has
not, within the last half-century, felt the dew of revival on the
threshing-floor of its worn-out schools of romance. Everywhere there
has been shown by young men, endowed with a talent for narrative, a
vigorous determination to devote themselves to a vivid and sympathetic
interpretation of nature and of man. In almost every language, too,
this movement has tended to display itself more and more in the
direction of what is reported and less of what is created. Fancy has
seemed to these young novelists a poorer thing than observation; the
world of dreams fainter than the world of men. They have not been
occupied mainly with what might be or what should be, but with what is,
and, in spite of all their shortcomings, they have combined to produce
a series of pictures of existing society in each of their several
countries such as cannot fail to form an archive of documents
invaluable to futurity.
But to us they should be still more valuable. To travel in a foreign
country is but to touch its surface. Under the guidance of a novelist
of genius we penetrate to the secrets of a nation, and talk the very
language of its citizens. We may go to Normandy summer after summer and
know less of the manner of life that proceeds under those gnarled
orchards of apple-blossom than we learn from one tale of Guy de
Maupassant's. The present series is intended to be a guide to the inner
geography of Europe. It presents to our readers a series of spiritual
Baedekers and Murrays. It will endeavour to keep pace with every truly
characteristic and vigorous expression of the novelist's art in each of
the principal European countries, presenting what is quite new if it is
also good, side by side with what is old, if it has not hitherto been
presented to our public. That will be selected which gives with most
freshness and variety the different aspects of continental feeling, the
only limits of selection being that a book shall be, on the one hand,
amusing, and, on the other, wholesome.
One difficulty which must be frankly faced is that of subject. Life is
now treated in fiction by every race but our own with singular candour.
The novelists of the Lutheran North are not more fully emancipated from
prejudice in this respect than the novelists of the Catholic South.
Everywhere in Europe a novel is looked upon now as an impersonal work,
from which the writer, as a mere observer, stands aloof, neither
blaming nor applauding. Continental fiction has learned to exclude, in
the main, from among the subjects of its attention, all but those facts
which are of common experience, and thus the novelists have determined
to disdain nothing and to repudiate nothing which is common to
humanity; much is freely discussed, even in the novels of Holland and
of Denmark, which our race is apt to treat with a much more gingerly
discretion. It is not difficult, however, we believe--it is certainly
not impossible--to discard all which may justly give offence, and yet
to offer to an English public as many of the masterpieces of European
fiction as we can ever hope to see included in this library. It will be
the endeavour of the editor to search on all hands and in all languages
for such books as combine the greatest literary value with the most
curious and amusing qualities of manner and matter.