Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source:
http://books.google.com/books?id=K0gRAQAAMAAJ
There is nothing in which the Anglo-Saxon world differs more from theworld of the Continent of Europe than in its fiction. English readersare accustomed to satisfy their curiosity with English novels, and itis rarely indeed that we turn aside to learn something of the interiorlife of those other countries the exterior scenery of which is often sofamiliar to us. We climb the Alps, but are content to know nothing ofthe pastoral romances of Switzerland. We steam in and out of thepicturesque fjords of Norway, but never guess what deep speculationinto life and morals is made by the novelists of that sparsely peopledbut richly endowed nation. We stroll across the courts of the Alhambra,we are listlessly rowed upon Venetian canals and Lombard lakes, wehasten by night through the roaring factories of Belgium; but we neverpause to inquire whether there is now flourishing a Spanish, anItalian, a Flemish school of fiction. Of Russian novels we have latelybeen taught to become partly aware, but we do not ask ourselves whetherPoland may not possess a Dostoieffsky and Portugal a Tolstoi.
Yet, as a matter of fact, there is no European country that hasnot, within the last half-century, felt the dew of revival on thethreshing-floor of its worn-out schools of romance. Everywhere therehas been shown by young men, endowed with a talent for narrative, avigorous determination to devote themselves to a vivid and sympatheticinterpretation of nature and of man. In almost every language, too,this movement has tended to display itself more and more in thedirection of what is reported and less of what is created. Fancy hasseemed to these young novelists a poorer thing than observation; theworld of dreams fainter than the world of men. They have not beenoccupied mainly with what might be or what should be, but with what is,and, in spite of all their shortcomings, they have combined to producea series of pictures of existing society in each of their severalcountries such as cannot fail to form an archive of documentsinvaluable to futurity.
But to us they should be still more valuable. To travel in a foreigncountry is but to touch its surface. Under the guidance of a novelistof genius we penetrate to the secrets of a nation, and talk the verylanguage of its citizens. We may go to Normandy summer after summer andknow less of the manner of life that proceeds under those gnarledorchards of apple-blossom than we learn from one tale of Guy deMaupassant's. The present series is intended to be a guide to the innergeography of Europe. It presents to our readers a series of spiritualBaedekers and Murrays. It will endeavour to keep pace with every trulycharacteristic and vigorous expression of the novelist's art in each ofthe principal European countries, presenting what is quite new if it isalso good, side by side with what is old, if it has not hitherto beenpresented to our public. That will be selected which gives with mostfreshness and variety the different aspects of continental feeling, theonly 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 isnow treated in fiction by every race but our own with singular candour.The novelists of the Lutheran North are not more fully emancipated fromprejudice in this respect than the novelists of the Catholic South.Everywhere in Europe a novel is looked upon now