This book reflects upon the eternal impulse in human nature to enliven the actual working life by the invention of tales of another kind of life, recognizable by its likeness to ordinary life, but so arranged that things happen more dramatically and pleasingly. That is the origin of what we call the folk tale or the fairy tale. These tales come out of the most distant deeps of human experience and human fancy. They deal with simple and enduring things, birth and marriage, hunger and thirst, natural sorrows and natural joys. the particular point I want to make is this: in a sophisticated society something more is wanted than the simple folk tale, and that something is the novel. My argument is that only in so far as the novel is a development of an akin to the folk and fairy tale does it fully suceed, and that it is in this kinship that the virtue of the great Victorian novels especially lies".