The English Novel Read online

  CHAPTER II

  FROM LYLY TO SWIFT

  During the dying-off of romance proper, or its transference from verseto prose in the late fifteenth and earlier sixteenth century, there isnot very much to note about prose fiction in England. But, as theconditions of modern literature fashioned themselves, a very greatinfluence in this as in other departments was no doubt exercised with usby Italian, as well as some by Spanish in a way which may be postponedfor a little. The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise thatinfluence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmospherewere as yet unfavourable for its growth. It is a hackneyed truism thatItalian society was very much more modern than any other in Europe atthis time--in fact it would not be a mere paradox to say that it was,and continued to be till the later sixteenth, much more modern than ithas ever been since--or till very recently. By "modern" is here meantthe kind of society which is fairly cultivated, fairly comfortable,fairly complicated with classes not very sharply separated from eachother, not dominated by any very high ideals, tolerably corrupt, andsufficiently business-like. The Italian _novella_, of course, admitswild passions and extravagant crimes: but the general tone of it is_bourgeois_--at any rate domestic. With its great number of situationsand motives, presented in miniature, careful work is necessary to bringout the effect: and, above all, there is abundant room for study ofmanners, for proverbial and popular wisdom and witticism, for"furniture"--to use that word in a wide sense. Above all, the Italianmind, like the Greek, had an ethical twist--twist in more senses thanone, some would say, but that does not matter. Manners, morals,motives--these three could not but displace, to some extent, mereincident: though there was generally incident of a poignant or piquantkind as well. In other words the _novella_ was actually (though still inminiature) a novel in nature as well as in name. And these _novelle_became, as is generally known, common in English translations after themiddle of the sixteenth century. Painter's huge _Palace of Pleasure_(1566) is only the largest and best known of many translations, singleand collected, of the Italian _novellieri_ and the French tale-tellers,contemporary, or of times more or less earlier.

  For some time, as almost everybody knows, these collections oftranslated matter served a purpose--great indeed, but somewhat outsidetheir proper department--by furnishing the Elizabethan dramatists with alarge part--perhaps the larger part--of their subjects. But they verysoon began to exercise it directly by suggesting the fictitious part ofthe prose pamphlet--a department which, though infinitely less wellknown than the plays, and still not very easy to know, holds almost thesecond position as representing the popular literature of theElizabethan time. And they also had--in one case certainly, in the otherprobably--no little influence upon the two great Elizabethan works whichin a manner founded the modern novel and the modern romance inEnglish--the _Euphues_ of Lyly and the _Arcadia_ of Sir Philip Sidney.

  The pamphlet stories (which are themselves often play-connected, as inthe case of Lodge's _Rosalynde_ and Greene's _Pandosto_) do not requiremuch notice, with one exception--Nash's _Jack Wilton or the UnfortunateTraveller_, to which some have assigned a position equal, or perhapssuperior in our particular subject, to that of the _Arcadia_ or that of_Euphues_. This seems to the present writer a mistake: but as to appearimportant is (in a not wholly unreal sense) to be so, the piece shall beseparately considered. The rest are mostly marred by a superabundance ofrather rudimentary art, and a very poor allowance of matter. There ishardly any character, and except in a few pieces, such as Lodge's_Margarite of America_, there is little attempt to utilise new scenesand conditions. But the whole class has special interest for us in onepeculiarity which makes it perhaps unreadable to any but students, andthat is its saturation with the Elizabethan conceit and word-play whichis sometimes called Euphuism. Nor is this wonderful, considering thatmore than one of these "pamphlets" is directly connected with the matterand the personages of _Euphues_ itself. To this famous book, therefore,we had better turn.

  Some people, it is believed, have denied that _Euphues_ is a novel atall; and some of these some have been almost indignant at its beingcalled one. It is certainly, with _Rasselas_, the most remarkableexample, in English, of a novel which is to a great extent deprived ofthe _agremens_ to which we have for some two centuries been accustomedin the kind, and, to a still greater, loaded with others which do notappeal to us. To put aside altogether its extraordinary and in a wayepoch-making style, which gives it its main actual place in the historyof English literature, it is further loaded with didactic digressionswhich, though certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in thekind, have never been quite equalled--no, not in _Rasselas_ itself orthe _Fool of Quality_. But if anybody, who has the necessary knowledgeto understand, and therefore the necessary patience to tolerate, theseknotty knarry envelopes, insertions, and excrescences, will for themoment pay no attention to them, but merely strip them off, he will findthe carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind. The first plot ofPhilautus--Euphues--Lucilla, and the successive jilting of the twofriends for each other and for Curio, is no mean novel-substance. NotBalzac himself, certainly no one of his successors, need disdain it: andmore than one of them has taken up something like it. The journey fromNaples to London, and the episode of Fidus and Iffida, could have beenworked up, in the good old three-volume days, to a most effective secondvolume. And the picture of the court, with the further loves ofPhilautus, Camilla, and the "violet" Frances, would supply a third ofthemselves even if Euphues were left out, though some livelierpresentation of his character (which Lyly himself was obviously too muchpersonally interested to make at all clear) would improve the wholeimmensely. But it was still too early: the thing was not yet to be done.Only, I do not know any book in which the possibilities, and even theoutlines, of this thing were indicated and vaguely sketched earlier inany European language, unless it be the _Lucretia and Euryalus_ of AEneasSilvius, which is much more confined in its scope.

  The fact is that the very confusedness, the many undeveloped sides, of_Euphues_, make it much more of an ancestor of the modern novel than ifit were more of a piece. The _quicquid agunt homines_ is as much theprovince of the novel as of the satire; and there is more than somethingof this as it affected Elizabethan times in _Euphues_. Men's interest inmorals, politics, and education; their development of the modern idea ofsociety; their taste for letters; their conceits and fancies--all theseappear in it.

  The _Arcadia_ stands in a different compartment. _Euphues_ is very much_sui generis_: failure as it may be from some points of view, itdeserves the highest respect for this, and like most other things _suigeneris_ it was destined to propagate the genus, if only after manydays. The _Arcadia_ was in intention certainly, and to great extent inactual fact, merely a carrying out of the attempt, common all overEurope (as a result of the critical searchings of heart of theItalians), to practise a new kind--the Heroic Romance of the sub-varietycalled pastoral. The "heroic" idea generally was (as ought to be, butperhaps is not, well known) to blend, after a fashion, classical andromantic characteristics--to substitute something like the classic unityof fable or plot for the mere "meandering" of romantic story, and to payat least as much attention to character as the classics had paid,instead of neglecting it altogether, as had recently though not alwaysbeen the case in Romance. But the scheme retained on the other hand thevariety of incident and appeal of this latter: and especially assignedto Love the high place which Romance had given it. As for thePastoral--that is almost a story to itself, and a story which has beenonly once (by Mr. W.W. Greg) satisfactorily, and then not quitecompletely, told. It is enough to say here, and as affecting our ownsubject, that it supplied a new opportunity of gratifying the passion ofthe Renaissance for imitating antiquity, at the same time permitting tono small extent the introduction of things that were really romantic,and above all providing a convention. The Heroic romance generally andthe Pastoral in particular went directly back to the Greek romances ofHeliodorus and Longus: but they admitted many new and foreign elem
ents.

  At the same time, bastard as the heroic romance was, it could not butexercise an important influence on the future of fiction, inasmuch as itcombined, or attempted to combine, with classical unity and mediaevalvariety the more modern interest of manners and (sometimes) personality.Sidney's attempt (which, it must be remembered, is not certainly knownto be wholly his as it stands, and _is_ certainly known not to have beenrevised by him for publication) exercised a very great influence inEnglish. For its popularity was enormous, and it doubtless served asshoehorn to draw on that of the English translations of French andSpanish romance which supplied, during the greater part of theseventeenth century, the want of original composition of the kind. Theunconscionable amount of talk and of writing "about it and about it"which _Euphues_ and the minor Euphuist romances display is at least asprominent in the _Arcadia_: and this talk rarely takes a form congenialto the modern novel reader's demands. Moreover, though there really is aplot, and a sufficient amount of incident, this reader undoubtedly, andto no small extent justly, demands that both incident and plot shall bemore disengaged from their framework--that they should be brought intohigher relief, should stand out more than is the case. Yet further, thepure character-interest is small--is almost nonexistent: and therococo-mosaic of manners and sentiment which was to prove the curse ofthe heroic romance generally prevents much interest being felt in thatdirection.[1] It would also be impossible to devise a style less suitedto prose narrative, except of a very peculiar kind and on a small scale,than that either of _Euphues_ or of the _Arcadia_, which, though anuncritical tradition credits it with driving out Lyly's, is practicallyonly a whelp of the same litter. Embarrassed, heavy, rhetorical, it hasits place in the general evolution of English prose, and a proper andvaluable place too. But it is bad even for pure romance purposes: andnearly hopeless for the panoramic and kaleidoscopic variety which shouldcharacterise the novel. To the actual successors of the _Arcadia_ inEnglish we shall come presently.

  [1] As a work of general literature, the attraction of the _Arcadia_ is of course much enhanced by, if it does not chiefly depend upon, its abundant, varied, and sometimes charming verse-insets. But, as a novel, it cannot count these.

  _The Unfortunate Traveller_ is of much less importance than the othertwo. It has obtained such reputation as it possesses, partly because ofits invention or improvement of the fable of "Surrey and Geraldine";more, and more justly, because it does work up a certain amount ofhistorical material--the wars of Henry VIII. in French Flanders--intosomething premonitory (with a little kindness on the part of thepremonished) of the great and long missed historical novel; still morefor something else. Nash, with his quick wit, seems to have been reallythe first to perceive the capabilities of that foreign travel andobservation of manners which was becoming common, stripped of thespecial atmosphere of pilgrimage which had formerly enveloped it. Evenhere, he had had the "notion of the notion" supplied to him by Lyly in_Euphues_: and a tolerably skilful advocate would not have so very muchdifficulty in claiming the book as one of the tribe of Euphuistpamphlets. But Jack Wilton the "traveller" is a little more of a personthan the pedagogic Euphues and the shadowy Philautus. At any rate he hasa very strong anticipation of Defoe, whose "Cavalier" was not improbablysuggested by him. But Nash has neither the patience of Defoe, nor thatsingular originality, which accompanies in the author of _Moll Flanders_a certain inability to make the most of it. _The Unfortunate Traveller_is a sort of compilation or congeries of current _fabliaux, novelle_,and _facetiae_, with the introduction of famous actual persons of thetime, from the crowned heads of the period, through Luther and Aretinedownwards, to give bait and attraction. Sometimes it reminds one of aworking up of the _Colloquies_ of Erasmus: three centuries earlier than_The Cloister and the Hearth_, with much less genius than CharlesReade's, and still more without his illegitimate advantage of actualnovels behind him for nearly half the time. But it gives us "disjectaemembra _novellae_" rather than a novel itself: and the oftener one readsit the more clear one is that the time for writing novels had not yetcome. The materials are there; the desire to utilise--and even a faintvague idea of _how_ to utilise--them is there; but the art is almostcompletely absent. Even regarded as an early attempt in the "picaresque"manner, it is abortive and only half organised.

  The subject of the English "Heroic" Romance, in the wide sense, is onewhich has been very little dealt with. Dunlop neglected it rathersurprisingly, and until Professor Raleigh's chapter on the subject therewas little of a satisfactory kind to be found about it anywhere. Itmust, however, be admitted that the abstainers from it have been to someextent justified in their abstention. The subject is a curious one: andit has an important place in the history of the Novel, because it showsat once how strong was the _nisus_ towards prose fiction and howsurprisingly difficult writers seem, nevertheless, to have found it tohit upon anything really good, much more anything really original inkind. For it is hardly too much to say that this century of attempt--wecannot call it a century of invention--from Ford to Congreve, does notadd a single piece of any considerable merit to the roll of Englishbooks. As for a masterpiece, there is nothing in respect of which theuse of such a word would not be purely ridiculous. And yet the attemptsare interesting to the historian, and should not be uninteresting to thehistorical student of literature. One or two of them have a sort ofshadowy name and place in literary history already.

  In tracing their progress and character, we must allow for two nativemodels: and for three foreign sources, one ancient, two modern, ofinfluence. _The Arcadia_ and _Euphues_, the former continuously, thelatter by revival after an interval, exercised very great effect in thefirst half of the seventeenth century, during at least the earlier partof which the vogue of _Amadis_ and its successors, as Englished byAnthony Munday and others, likewise continued. The Greek romances alsohad much to do with the matter: for the Elizabethan translators hadintroduced them to the vulgar, and the seventeenth century paid a gooddeal of attention to Greek. Then, when that century itself was on itsway, the pastoral romance of D'Urfe first, and the Calprenede-Scuderyproductions in the second place, came to give a fresh impulse, andsomething of a new turn. The actual translations of French and Spanishromance, shorter and longer, good, bad, and indifferent, are of immensebulk and doubtless excited imitation: but we cannot possibly deal withthem here. A bare list would fill a chapter. But some work of more orless (generally less) originality, in at least adaptation, calls for alittle individual notice: and some general characterisation may beadded.

  It may be desirable to prelude the story by a reminder to the readerthat the _general_ characteristics of these various sources were"harlequin" in their diversity of apparent colour. The _Amadis_ romancesand, indeed, all the later examples of that great kind, such as _Arthurof Little Britain_, which Berners translated, were distinguished on theone side by a curious convention of unsmooth running of the course oflove, on the other sometimes by a much greater licence of morality thantheir predecessors, and always by a prodigality of the "conjuror'ssupernatural"--witches and giants and magic black and white. The Spanish"picaresque" story was pretty real but even less decent: and its Frenchimitations (though not usually reaching the licence of the short tale,which clung to _fabliau_ ways in this respect) imitated it here also.The French heroic romance, on the other hand, observed the mostscrupulous propriety in language and situation: but aggravated theAmadisian troubling of the course of true love, and complicatedeverything, very frequently if not invariably, by an insinuated "key"interest of identification of the ancient personages selected as heroesand heroines with modern personages of quality and distinction.

  Emanuel Ford (whom the British Museum catalogue insists on spellingFord_e_ and of whom very little seems to be known) published _Parismus,Prince of Bohemia_, as early as 1598. In less than a hundred years(1696) it had reached its fourteenth edition, and it continued to bepopular in abridged and chap-booked form[2] far into the eighteenthcentury. (It is sometimes called _Parismus and Paris
menus_: the secondpart being, as very commonly in romances of the class after the _Amadis_pattern, occupied largely with the adventures of the son of the hero ofthe first.) On the whole, _Parismus_, though it has few pretensions toelegance of style, and though some delicate tastes have been shocked atcertain licences of incident, description, and phrase in it, is quitethe best of our bunch in this kind. It is, in general conception, pure_Amadis_ of the later and slightly degraded type. Laurana, the heroine(of whom a peculiarly hideous portrait adorns the black-letter editionsside by side with Parismus himself, who is rather a "jolly gentleman")is won with much less difficulty and in much less time than Oriana--butseparations and difficulties duly follow in "desolate isles" and thelike. And though Parismus himself is less of an Amadis than Amadis, the"contrast of friends," founded by that hero and Galaor, is kept up byhis association with a certain Pollipus--"a man of his hands" if everthere was one, for with them he literally wrings the neck of theenchantress Bellona, who has enticed him to embrace her. There is plentyof the book, as there always should be in its kind (between 400 and 500very closely printed quarto pages), and its bulk is composed ofproportionately plentiful fighting and love-making and of a very muchsmaller proportion of what schoolboys irreverently call "jaw" than isusual in the class. If it were not for the black letter (which is tryingto the eyes) I should not myself object to have no other reading than_Parismus_ for some holiday evenings, or even after pretty tough days ofliterary and professional work. _The Famous History of Montelion, theKnight of the Oracle_ (1633?) proclaims its Amadisian type even moreclearly: but I have only read it in an abridged edition of the close ofthe century. I should imagine that _in extenso_ it was a good dealduller than _Parismus_. And of course the comparative praise which hasbeen given to that book must be subject to the reminder that it is whatit is--a romance of disorderly and what some people call childishadventure, and of the above-ticketed "conjuror's supernatural." Ifanybody cannot read _Amadis_ itself, he certainly will not read_Parismus_: and perhaps not everybody who can manage the original--perhapsnot even everybody who can manage _Palmerin_--could put up with Ford'scopy. I can take this Ford as I find him: but I am not sure that I wouldgo much lower.

  [2] It is pleasant to remember that one of the chief publishers of these things in the late seventeenth century was _W. Thackeray_.

  _Ornatus and Artesia_ (1607?), on the other hand--his second or thirdbook--strikes me as owing more to Heliodorus than to Montalvo, orLobeira, or whoever was the author of the great romance of the lastchivalric type. There are more intricacies in it; the heroine plays arather more important part; there is even something of a nearer approachto modern novel-ways in this production, which reappeared at "GrubStreet near the Upper Pump" in the year 1650. Ornatus sees his mistressasleep and in a kind of deshabille, employs a noble go-between, Adellena(a queer spelling of "Adelina" which may be intentional), is rejectedwith apparent indignation, of course; writes elaborate letters in vain,but overhears Artesia soliloquising confession of her love for him anddisguises himself as a girl, Silvia. Then the villain of the piece,Floretus, to obtain the love of this supposed Silvia, murders a personof distinction and plots to poison Artesia herself. Ornatus-Silvia isbanished: and all sorts of adventures and disguises follow, entirely inthe Greek style. The book is not very long, extending only to signatureR in a very small quarto. Except that it is much less lively andconsiderably less "free," it reminds one rather in type of Kynaston'sverse _Leoline and Sydanis_. In fact the verse and prose romances of thetime are very closely connected: and Chamberlayne's _Pharonnida_--farthe finest production of the English "heroic" school in prose, verse, ordrama--was, when the fancy for abridging set in, condensed into a tinyprose _Eromena_. But _Ornatus and Artesia_, if more modern, moredecent, and less extravagant than _Parismus_, is nothing like sointeresting to read. It is indeed quite possible that there is, if notin it, in its popularity, a set-back to the _Arcadia_ itself, which hadbeen directly followed in Lady Mary Wroth's _Urania_ (1621), and towhich (by the time of the edition noted) Charles I.'s admiration--soindecently and ignobly referred to by Milton--had given a freshattraction for all good anti-Puritans. That an anti-Puritan should be aromance-lover was almost a necessity.

  When the French "heroics" began to appear it was only natural that theyshould be translated, and scarcely less so that they should be imitatedin England. For they were not far off the _Arcadia_ pattern: and theywere a distinct and considerable effort to supply the appetite forfiction which has been dwelt upon. But except for this, and forfashion's sake, they did not contain much that would appeal to anEnglish taste: and it is a little significant that one great reader ofthem who is known to us--Mrs. Pepys--was a Frenchwoman. Indeed, save forthe very considerable "pastime" of a kind that they gave to a time, muchof which required passing, it is difficult to understand theirattraction for English readers. Their interminable talk never (tillperhaps very recently) was a thing to suit our nation: and the "key"interest strikes us at any rate as of the most languid kind. But they_were_ imitated as well as translated: and the three most famous of theimitations are the work of men of mark in their different ways. Theseare the _Parthenissa_ (1654) of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill and Earl ofOrrery; the _Aretina_ (1661) of Sir George Mackenzie; and the _Pandionand Amphigeneia_ (1665) of "starch Johnny" Crowne.

  Boyle was a strong Francophile in literature, and his not inconsiderableinfluence on the development of the heroic _play_ showed it only lessdecidedly than his imitation of the Scudery romance. I cannot say that Ihave read _Parthenissa_ through: and I can say that I do not intend todo so. It is enough to have read Sainte Madeleine of the Ink-Desertherself, without reading bad imitations of her. But I have read enoughto know that _Parthenissa_ would never give me anything like themodified satisfaction that is given by _Parismus_: and after all, if aman will not take the trouble to finish writing his book (which Orrerynever did) why should his readers take the trouble even to finishreading what he has written? The scene is Parthia, with alternation toSyria, and diversions and episodes elsewhere: and though there is acertain amount of fighting, the staple is quite decorous but exceedinglydull love-making, conducted partly in the endless dialogue (or ratherautomatic monologue) already referred to, and partly in letters more"handsome" even than Mr. Frank Churchill's, and probably a good dealmore sincere in their conventional way, but pretty certainly lessamusing. The original attraction indeed of this class of novelconsisted, and, in so far as it still exists, may be said to consist, innoble sentiment, elegantly expressed. It deserved, and in a mannerdeserves, the commendatory part of Aramis's rebuke to Porthos forexpressing impatience with the compliments between Athos and D'Artagnanat their first and hostile rencounter.[3] Otherwise there is not much tobe said for it. It does not indeed deserve Johnson's often quoted remarkas to Richardson (on whom when we come to him we shall have somethingmore to say in connection with these heroic romances), if any one wereto read _Parthenissa_ for the story he would not, unless he were a veryimpulsive person, "hang himself." He would simply, after a number ofpages varying with the individual, cease to read it.

  [3] "Quant a moi, je trouve les choses que ces messieurs se disent fort bien dites et tout a fait dignes de deux gentilhommes."

  The work of the great Lord Advocate who was traduced by Covenantingmalice is in a certain sense more interesting: and that not merelybecause it is much shorter. _Aretina_ or _The Serious Romance_, openswith an "apology for Romances" generally, which goes far to justifyDryden's high opinion of Mackenzie as a critic. But it cannot be said tobe much--it is a little--more interesting as a story than _Parthenissa_,and it is written in a most singular lingo--not displaying the racyquaintness of Mackenzie's elder contemporary and fellow-loyalistUrquhart, but a sort of Scotified and modernised Euphuism ratherterrible to peruse. A library is "a bibliotheck richly tapestried withbooks." Somebody possesses, or is compared to "a cacochymick stomach,which transubstantiates the best of meats in its own malignant humour."And when the hero meets a pair
of cannibal ruffians he confronts one and"pulling out a pistol, sends from its barrel two balls clothed inDeath's livery, and by them opens a sallyport to his soul to fly out ofthat nasty prison." A certain zest may be given by these oddities, butit hardly lasts out more than 400 pages: and though the lives of Aretinaand Philaretes are more simply and straightforwardly told than might bethought likely--though there are ingenious disguises of contemporarypolitics, and though Mackenzie was both a wise man and a wit--it is morecertain than ever, when we close his book, that this is not the way ofthe world, nor the man to walk in that way.

  _Pandion and Amphigeneia_ is the inferior in importance of both thesebooks. Crowne had perhaps rather more talent than it is usual to credithim with, but he does not show it here. I think Sir Walter Raleigh isquite right in regarding the book as more or less traced over the_Arcadia_: and it may be said to have all the defects of Sidney'sscheme--which, it is fair once more to observe, we do not possess in anyform definitely settled by its author--with none of the merits of hisornament, his execution, and his atmosphere of poetic fancy.

  The fact is that this heroic romance was foredoomed to inefficiency. Itwas not a genuine _kind_ at all: but a sort of patchwork of imitationsof imitations--a mule which, unlike the natural animal, was itself bred,and bred in and in, of mules for generations back. It was true to notime, to no country, to no system of manners, life, or thought. Itsoldest ancestor in one sense, though not in another--the Greekromance--was itself the growth of the latest and most artificial periodof the literature to which it belonged. The pure mediaeval romance ofchivalry was another, but of this it had practically nothing left. The_Amadis_ class, the late Renaissance pastorals, the immediatelypreceding or accompanying French romances of the Scudery type, were, inincreasing degree, hybrid, artificial, and dead-alive. Impotence andsterility in every sense could but be its portion. Of the two greatqualities of the novel--Variety and Life--it had never succeeded inattaining any considerable share, and it had now the merest show ofvariety and no life at all. There is hardly anything to be said in itsfavour, except that its vogue, as has been observed, testified to thecraving for prose fiction, and kept at least a simulacrum of thatfiction before the public. How far there may be any real, thoughmetaphysical, connection between the great dramatic output of thisseventeenth century in England and its small production in novel is aquestion not to be discussed here. But undoubtedly the fact of thecontrast is a "document in the case," and one of the most important inits own direction; completing the testimony of the mediaeval period inthe other (that as romance dwindled, drama grew) and leading up to thatof the eighteenth century when drama dwindled and the novel grew. Thepractice of Afra Behn in both, and the fact that Congreve, the greatestEnglish dramatist of the close of the century, began with a novel anddeserted the style for drama, are also interesting, and combinethemselves very apparently with the considerations just glanced at. ButCongreve and Afra must be postponed for a moment.

  The two last discussed books, with _Eromena_ and some others, areposterior to the Restoration in date, but somewhat earlier in type. Thereign of Charles II., besides the "heroic" romances and Bunyan, and onemost curious little production to be noticed presently, is properlyrepresented in fiction by two writers, to whom, by those who like tomake discoveries, considerable importance has sometimes been assigned inthe history of the English Novel. These are Richard Head and Afra Behn,otherwise "the divine Astraea." It is, however, something of an injusticeto class them together: for Afra was a woman of very great ability, witha suspicion of genius, while Head was at the very best a bookmaker ofnot quite the lowest order, though pretty near it. Of _The EnglishRogue_ (1665-1680), which earns him his place here, only the first part,and a certain section of the fourth, are even attributed to him byFrancis Kirkman, the Curll of his generation, who published the thing atintervals and admittedly wrote parts of it himself. It is quite openly apicaresque novel: and imitated not merely from the Spanish originals butfrom Sorel's _Francion_, which had appeared in France some forty yearsbefore. Yet, if we compare this latter curious book with Head's we shallsee how very far behind, even with forty years' advantage in time, wasthe country which, in the next century, was practically to create themodern novel. _Francion_ is not a work of genius: and it does notpretend to much more than the usual picaresque farrago of adventure,unmoral and sometimes rather cruel, but comic of a kind, strung togetherwith little art in fable, and less in character. But the author is tosome extent "cumbered about serving." He names his characters, tries togive them some vague personality, furnishes them with some roughly andsketchily painted scenery, and gives us not merely told tales, butoccasionally something distantly resembling conversation. Head takes notrouble of this kind: and Kirkman does not seem to think that any suchthing is required of him. Very few of the characters of _The EnglishRogue_ have so much as a name to their backs: they are "a prentice," "amaster," "a mistress," "a servant," "a daughter," "a tapster," etc. Theyare invested with hardly the slightest individuality: the very hero is ascoundrel as characterless as he is nameless:[4] he is the mere threadwhich keeps the beads of the story together after a fashion. These beadsthemselves, moreover, are only the old anecdotes of "coney-catching,"over-reaching, and worse, which had separately filled a thousand_fabliaux, novelle_, "jests," and so forth: and which are now flungtogether in gross, chiefly by the excessively clumsy and unimaginativeexpedient of making the personages tell long strings of them as theirown experience. When anything more is wanted, accounts of the manners offoreign countries, taken from "voyage-and-travel" books; of the tricksof particular trades (as here of piratical book-selling); of anythingand everything that the writer's dull fancy can think of, are foistedin. The thing is in four volumes, and it seems that a fifth was intendedas a close: but there is no particular reason why it should not haveextended to forty or fifty, nay to four or five hundred. It could havehad no real end, just as it has no real beginning or middle.

  [4] He _has_ a name, Meriton Latroon, but it is practically never used in the actual story.

  One other point deserves notice. The tone of the Spanish and Frenchpicaresque novel had never been high: but it is curiously degraded inthis English example. Furetiere honestly called his book _RomanBourgeois_. Head might have called his, if he had written in French,_Roman Canaille_. Not merely the sentiments but the very outwardtrappings and accidents of gentility are banished from the book. Yet wedo not get any real reality in compensation. Head is no Defoe: he cangive us the company that Colonel Jack kept in his youth and MollFlanders in her middle age: but he makes not the slightest attempt togive us Moll or Jack, or even Moll's or Jack's habit, environment,novel-furniture of any kind whatsoever. The receipt to make _The EnglishRogue_ is simply this: "Take from two to three dozen Elizabethanpamphlets of different kinds, but principally of the 'coney-catching'variety, and string them together by making a batch of shadowypersonages tell them to each other when they are not acting in them."Except in a dim sort of idea that a novel should have some bulk andsubstance, it is difficult to see any advance whatever in thismuck-heap--which the present writer, having had to read it a second timefor the present purpose, most heartily hopes to be able to leavehenceforth undisturbed on his shelves.

  Not in this fashion must the illustrious Afra be spoken of. It is truethat--since it ceased to be the fashion merely to dismiss her with a"fie-fie!" which her prose work, at any rate, by no means merits--therehas sometimes been a tendency rather to overdo praise of her, not merelyin reference to her lyrics, some of which can never be praised toohighly, but in reference to these novels. _Oroonoko_ or _The RoyalSlave_, with its celebration of the virtues of a noble negro and hislove for his Imoinda, and his brutal ill-treatment and death by tortureat the hands of white murderers, undoubtedly took the fancy of thepublic. But to see at once Rousseau and Byron in it, Chateaubriand andWilberforce and I know not what else, is rather in the "lunatic, lover,and poet" order of vision. Even Head and Kirkman, as we have observed,had perceived the advantage of
foreign scenery and travel to vary theirmatter; Afra had herself been in Guiana; and, as she was of a veryinflammable disposition, it is quite possible that some Indian Othellohad caught her fresh imagination. On the other hand, there was theheroic romance, with all its sighs and flames, still the rage: and amuch less nimble intellect than Afra's, with a much less cosmopolitanexperience, might easily see the use of transposing it into a new key.Still, there is no doubt that _The Royal Slave_ and even its companionsare far above the dull, dirty, and never more than half alive stuff of_The English Rogue. Oroonoko_ is a story, not a pamphlet or a mere"coney-catching" jest. To say that it wants either contraction orexpansion; less "talk about it" and more actual conversation; a strongerprojection of character and other things; is merely to say that it is anexperiment in the infancy of the novel, not a following out of secretsalready divulged. It certainly is the first prose story in English whichcan be ranked with things that already existed in foreign literatures.Nor is it the only one of the batch in which advance is seen. "The Kingof Bantam," for instance, is the account of an "extravagant," though notquite a fool, who is "coney-catched" in the old manner. But it opens ina fashion very different indeed from the old manner. "This money iscertainly a most devilish thing! I'm sure the want of it had been liketo ruin my dear Philibella!" and the succeeding adventures are prettyfreshly told. The trick of headlong overture was a favourite with Afra."The Adventure of the Black Lady" begins, "About the beginning of lastJune, as near as I can remember, Bellamira came to town from Hampshire."It is a trick of course: and here probably borrowed from the French: butthe line which separates trick from artistic device is an exceedinglynarrow and winding one. At any rate, this plunging into the middle ofthings wakes up the reader's attention, and does not permit him to doze."The Lucky Mistake," on the other hand, opens with a little landscape,"The river Loire has on its delightful banks, etc." "The Fair Jilt," aBandello-like story, begins with an exaltation of Love: and so on. Nowthese things, though they may seem matters of course to the mere modernreader, were not matters of course then. Afra very likely imitated; herworks have never been critically edited; and have not served as fieldfor much origin-hunting. But whether she followed others or not, she ledher own division. All these things and others are signs of an awakenedconscience--of a sense of the fact that fiction, to be literature, mustbe something more than the relation of a bare fact, tragic, comic, orneutral--that the novelist is a cook, and must prepare and serve hismaterials with a sauce as much his own as possible, of plot,arrangement, character-drawing, scenery, conversation, reflection, andwhat not. That conversation itself--the subtlest instrument of all andthe most effective for constructing character--is so little developed,can only, I think, be accounted for by supposing Afra and others to beunder the not unnatural mistake that conversation especially belonged tothe drama, which was still the most popular form of literature, and inwhich she herself was a copious practitioner. But this mistake was notlong to prevail: and it had no effect on that great contemporary of herswho would, it is to be feared, have used the harshest languagerespecting her, and to whom we now come.

  It is impossible to share, and not very easy even to understand, thescruples of those who would not admit John Bunyan to a place in thehierarchy and the pedigree of the English novel, or would at best granthim an outside position in relation to it. Their exquisite reasons, sofar as one can discern them, appear to be (or to concern) the facts that_The Pilgrim's Progress_ and _The Holy War_ are religious, and that theyare allegories.[5] It may be humbly suggested that by applying thedouble rule to verse we can exclude _Paradise Lost_ and the _FaerieQueene_ from the succession of English Poetry, whereby no doubt weshall be finely holden in understanding the same: while it is by nomeans certain that, if the exclusion of allegory be pushed home, we mustnot cancel _Don Quixote_ from the list of the world's novels. Even inprose, to speak plainly, the hesitation--unless it comes from thefoolish dislike to things religious, as such, which has been the bigotryof the last generation or two--comes from the almost equally foolishdetermination to draw up arbitrary laws of literary kind. Discardingprejudice and punctilio, every one must surely see that, in diminishingmeasure, even _The Holy War_ is a novel, and that _The Pilgrim'sProgress_ has every one of the four requisites--plot, character,description, and dialogue--while one of these requisites--character withits accessory manners--is further developed in the _History of Mr.Badman_ after a fashion for which we shall look vainly in any divisionof European literature (except drama) before it. This latter fact hasindeed obtained a fair amount of recognition since Mr. Froude drew theattention of the general reader to it in his book on Bunyan, in the"English Men of Letters" series, five-and-twenty years ago: but it musthave struck careful readers of the great tinker's minor works longbefore. Indeed there are very good internal reasons for thinking that noless a person than Thackeray must have known _Mr. Badman_. Thiswonderful little sketch, however--the related history of a man who is anutter rascal both in family and commercial relations, but preserves hisreputation intact and does not even experience any deathbedrepentance--is rather an unconscious study for a character in a novel--asketch of a _bourgeois_ Barnes Newcome--than anything more. It has theold drawback of being narrated, not acted or spoken at first hand: andso, though it is in a sense Fielding at nearly his best, more than halfa century before Fielding attempted _Joseph Andrews_, no more need besaid of it. So, too, the religious element and the allegory _are_ tooprominent in _The Holy War_--the novelist's desk is made too much of apulpit in large parts of it. Other parts, concerning the inhabitants ofMansoul and their private affairs, are domestic novel-writing of nearlythe pure kind: and if _The Pilgrim's Progress_ did not exist, it wouldbe worth while to pick them out and discuss them. But, as it mostfortunately does exist, this is not needful.

  [5] The heroic kind had lent itself very easily and obviously to allegory. Not very long before Bunyan English literature had been enriched with a specimen of this double variety which for Sir W. Raleigh "marks the lowest depth to which English romance writing sank." I do not know that I could go quite so far as this in regard to the book--_Bentivolio and Urania_ by Nathaniel Ingelo. The first edition of this appeared in 1660: the second (there seem to have been at least four) lies before me at this moment dated 1669, or nine years before the _Progress_ itself. You require a deep-sea-lead of uncommonly cunning construction to sound, register, and compare the profundities of the bathos in novels. The book has about 400 folio pages very closely packed with type, besides an alphabetical index full of Hebrew and Greek derivations of its names--"Gnothisauton," "Achamoth," "Ametameletus," "Dogmapernes," and so forth. Its principles are inexorably virtuous; there is occasional action interspersed among its innumerable discourses, and I think it not improbable that if it were only possible to read it, it might do one some good. But it would not be the good of the novel.

  The only fault with the novel-character of the greater book which mightpossibly be found by a critic who did not let the allegory bite him, andwas not frightened by the religion, is that there is next to no loveelement in it, though there are wedding bells. Mercy is indeed quitenice enough for a heroine: but Bunyan might have bestowed her betterthan on a young gentleman so very young that he had not long before madehimself (no doubt allegorically) ill with unripe and unwholesome fruit.But if he had done so, the suspicions of his brethren--_they_ were acuteenough as it was not to mistake the character of the book, whatevermodern critics may do--would have been even more unallayable. And, as itis, the "alluring countenance" does shed not a little grace upon thestory, or at least upon the Second Part: while the intenser character ofthe First hardly requires this. Any other lack is, to the presentwriter, imperceptible. The romance interest of quest, adventure,achievement, is present to the fullest degree: and what is sometimescalled the pure novel interest of character and conversation is presentin a degree not lower. It must be accepted as a great blessing, even bythose who regard Puritanism as an
almost unmitigated curse, that itsprinciples forbade Bunyan to think of choosing the profane andabominable stage-play as the form of his creation. We had had our fillof good plays, and were beginning to drink of that which was worse:while we had no good novels and wanted them. Of course the large amountof actual "Tig and Tirry" dialogue (as Dr. Johnson would say) isprobably one of the things which have made precisians shy of acceptingthe _Progress_ for what it really is. But we must remember that thisencroachment on the dramatic province was exactly what was wanted toremove the reproach of fiction. The inability to put actual conversationof a lively kind in the mouths of personages has been indicated as oneof the great defects of the novel up to this time. Except Cervantes, itis difficult to think of any novelist who had shown himself able tosupply the want. Bunyan can do it as few have done it even since histime. The famous dialogue of Christian and By-ends is only the best--ifit is the best--of scores nearly or quite as good. The curiousintellectual flaccidity of the present day seems to be "put off" by the"ticket" names; but no one who has the true literary sense cares forthese one way or another, or is more disturbed by them than if they wereWilkins and Jones. Just as Coleridge observed that to enjoy some kindsof poetry you must suspend disbelief, so, with mere literary fashions,you must suspend disagreement. We should not call By-ends By-ends now:and whether we should do better or worse nobody, as Plato says, knowsbut the Deity. But the best of us would be hard put to it to makeBy-ends reveal his By-endishness more perfectly than he does by hisconversation, and without any ticket-name at all.

  Not less remarkable, and only a little less new, is the vividness andsufficiency of the scene painting and setting. It has been said thatthe great novelists not only provide us with a world of friends morereal and enjoyable than the actual folk we know, but also with a worldfor those friends to live in, more real and far more enjoyable than theworld in which we ourselves sojourn. And this is well seen of Christian.The Slough of Despond and the terrible overhanging hill; the gateway andthe Interpreter's House and the House Beautiful; the ups and downs ofthe road, and the arbours and the giants' dens: Beulah and theDelectable Mountains:--one knows them as one knows the country that onehas walked over, and perhaps even better. There is no description fordescription's sake: yet nothing is wanting of the descriptive kind.

  Yet all these things are--as they should be--only subsidiary to the maininterest of the Pilgrimage itself. Once more, one may fear that it is nogood sign of the wits of the age that readers should be unable todiscard familiarity with the argument of the story. It is the way inwhich that argument is worked out and illustrated that is the thing. Ihave never myself, since I became thoroughly acquainted with Lydgate'sEnglishing of Deguilevile's _Pilgrimage of the Soul of Man_, had anydoubt that--in some way or other, direct or indirect, at tenth ortwentieth hand perhaps--Bunyan was acquainted with it: but this is of noimportance. He might undoubtedly have got all his materials straight outof the Bible. But his working of them up is all his own, and iswonderful. Here, to begin with, is the marvel not merely of acontinuation which is not a falling off, but of a repetition of the samegeneral scheme with different but closely connected personages, which isentirely free from monotony. One is so accustomed to the facts thatperhaps it hardly strikes one at first how extraordinarily audacious theattempt is: nay, the very success of it may blind all but critics tothe difficulty. It is no wonder that people tried further continuationsand further complications: still less wonder that they utterly failed.Probably even Bunyan himself could not have "done it a third time." Buthe did it these twice with such vividness of figure and action; suchcompleteness of fable; such sufficiency of behaviour and of speech ashave scarcely ever been equalled. As ideal as Spenser, as real as Defoe:such is Bunyan. And he shows this realism and this idealism in a prosenarrative, bringing the thoughts and actions and characters and speechof fictitious human beings before his readers--for their inspectionperhaps; for their delight certainly. If this is not the being and thedoing of a novelist this deponent very humbly declareth that he knowethnot what the being and the doing of a novelist are.

  We must now turn to two small but noteworthy attempts at the kind, whichhave been referred to above.

  In 1668 there appeared a very curious little book (entitled at greatlength after the manner of the times, but more shortly called _The Isleof Pines_), which is important in the literary ancestry of Defoe andSwift and not unimportant in itself. Its author was Henry Neville, ofthe Nevilles of Billingbeare, son of one Sir Henry and grandson ofanother, the grandfather having been of some mark in diplomacy andcourtiership in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times. The grandsonhad had a life of some stir earlier. Born in 1620, and educated atMerton and University Colleges, he had left Oxford without a degree, hadtaken the Parliamentary side, but as a rigid Republican andanti-Cromwellite; had been a member of the Rota, and after theRestoration had been arrested in 1663 for supposed treasonablepractices, but escaped serious punishment. He lived quietly for morethan thirty years longer and died in 1694. Besides _The Isle of Pines_he wrote satirical tracts (the _Parliament of Ladies_ being the bestknown), translated Machiavelli, and was evidently a man of parts,though, like his friend Harrington, something of a "crank." He seemsalso to have been, as some others of the extremer Puritans certainlywere, pretty loose in his construction of moral laws.

  _The Isle_ is a very short book of thirty-one quarto pages: but there isa good deal in it, and it must have been very carefully written. Acertain Cornelius van Sloetten writes, "supported by letters fromAmsterdam," how a Dutch ship, driven far out of reckoning in theSouthern Ocean, comes to a "fourth island, near Terra AustralisIncognita," which is inhabited by white people, speaking English, butmostly naked. The headman is a certain William Pine, whose grandfather,George, has left a written account of the origin of the community. Thisrelates how George was wrecked on the island, the ship perishing "withman and mouse," except himself, his master's daughter, two whitemaidservants, and a negro girl. The island proves pleasant andhabitable: and George, to prevent unfairness and ill-feeling, uniteshimself to all his female companions, the quintet living in perfectharmony. Thirty-seven children result: and these at first necessarilyintermarry; but after this first generation, a rule is made thatbrothers and sisters may not unite--the descendants of the four originalwives forming clans who may marry into the others but not into theirown. A wider legal code of fair stringency is arranged, with thesanction of capital and other punishments: and things go so well thatthe patriarch musters a tribe of 565 persons by the time he is sixty,and of 1789 twenty years later, when he departs this life, piouslypraying God "to multiply them and send them the true report of thegospel." The multiplication has duly taken place, and there is somethinglike a civil war while the Dutch are there; but they interfere withfire-arms to restore order, and leave all well. The writer's cunning isshown by the fact that he does not stop abruptly: but finishes off withsome subsequent and quite _verisimilar_ experiences of the Dutch ship.The book does not appear to have had a very great popularity in England,though it was reprinted and abridged at least once, pretty shortly. Butit was very popular abroad, was translated into three or four languages,and was apparently taken as a genuine account.

  Neville's art is in fact not inconsiderable. Earlier voyages and travelsof course supplied him with his technical and geographical details: andthe codification of the Isle of Pines suggests the Bacon-Harringtontradition. But he has got the vividness and realism which have usuallybeen lacking before: and though some of his details are pretty "free" itis by no means only through such things that these qualities aresecured. To Cyrano de Bergerac he bears no likeness at all. In fact,though Neville _was_ a satirist, satire does not seem to have been inany way his object here. Whatever that object may have been, he hascertainly struck, by accident or not, on the secret of producing aninteresting account by ingeniously multiplied and adjusted detail.Moreover, as there is no conversation, the book stands--accidentallythis time almost without doubt--at the opposite pole from thetal
k-deluged romances of the Scudery type. Whether Defoe actually knewit or not matters exceedingly little: that something of his method, andin a manner the subject of his first and most famous novel, are herebefore him, seems quite indisputable. Perhaps not the least piquantthing to do with _The Isle of Pines_ is to contrast it with _Oceana_. Ofcourse the contrast is unfair: nearly all contrasts are. But there isactually, as has been pointed out, a slight contact between the work ofthe two friends: and their complete difference in every other respectmakes this more curiously apparent. And another odd thing is thatNeville--"Rota"-republican as he was--should have adopted patriarchal(one can hardly say _legitimate_) government here.

  Congreve's _Incognita_ (1692), the last seventeenth-century novel thatrequires special notice, belongs much more to the class of Afra's talesthan to that of the heroic romances. It is a short story of seventy-fivesmall pages only and of the Italian-Spanish imbroglio type. The friendsAurelian and Hippolito take each other's names for certain purposes, andtheir beloveds, "Incognita," Juliana and Leonora, are perplexedaccordingly: while family feuds, letter assignations at a convent wherethe name of the convent unluckily happens to be torn off, and otherstock ingredients of the kind are freely used. Most writers have eithersaid nothing about the book or have given it scanty praise; with theexception, Sir Walter Raleigh, I confess that I cannot here agree. BeingCongreve's it could not be quite without flashes of wit, but they do notappear to me to be either very numerous or very brilliant; the plot,such as it is, is a plot of drama rather than of fiction; and there isno character that I can see. It is in fact only one of a vast multitudeof similar stories, not merely in the two languages just referred to,but in French, which were but to show that the time of the novel was notyet come, even when the time of this century was all but over.

  It was quite over, and the first two decades of the next were all butover too, before the way was, to any important extent, further explored:but important assistance in the exploration was given at the beginningof the second of these decades. The history of the question of therelations of the Addison-Steele periodical, and especially of the"Coverley Papers," to the novel is both instructive and amusing to thosewho have come to appreciate the humours of literary things. It wouldprobably have shocked the more orthodox admirers of the _Spectator_,during the eighteenth century, to have any such connection or relationso much as hinted. But when people began to consider literature andliterary history in a better arranged perspective, the fact that there_is_ such a connection or relation must have been soon perceived. It hasbecome comparatively a commonplace: and now the third stage--that inwhich people become uneasy and suspicious of the commonplace and obviousand try to turn it topsy-turvy--has begun.

  It is of course undeniable that the "Coverley Papers," as they stand,are not a novel, even on the loosest conception and construction of theterm. There is no plot; some of what should be the most importantcharacters are merely heard of, not seen; and the various scenes have nosort of connection, except that the same persons figure in them. Butthese undeniable facts do not interfere with two other facts, equallyundeniable and much more important. The first is that the papers couldbe turned into a novel with hardly any important alteration, and withonly _quantum suff._ of addition and completion. "The widow" is there inthe background ready to be produced and made a heroine; many of theincidents are told novel-fashion already, and more could be translatedinto that fashion by the veriest tyro at novel writing who has writtenat any time during the last one hundred and fifty years. The personagesof the club have merely to step down and out; the scenes to beconnected, amplified, and multiplied; the conversation to undergo thesame process.

  But the second point is of greater importance still. Not only could the"Coverley Papers," be made into a novel without the slightestdifficulty, and by a process much of which would be simple enlargementof material; but they already possess, in a fashion which requires noalteration at all, many of the features of the novel, far moresuccessfully hit off than had ever been done before in the novel itself.This is true of the dialogue to no small extent, and of the descriptioneven more: but it is truest of all of the characters. Except Bunyan,nobody in prose fiction had ever made personages so thoroughly spiritedas Sir Roger and even the two Wills, Honeycomb and Wimble; while herethere was "no allaying Thames" in the shape of allegory, littlemoralising and that of a kind quite human, a plentiful setting ofordinary and familiar scene, and a more plentiful and exact adjustmentof ordinary and familiar manners. It is true that Addison, partly owingto the undercurrent of his satirical humour (Steele succeeds ratherbetter here), has not attained the astonishing verisimilitude of thewriter to whom we shall come next and last but one in this chapter. Hischaracters are perfectly natural, but we know, all the while, that theyare works of art. But in most of the points just mentioned he hasexactly the tricks of the novelist's art that Defoe has not. The smallertales in the _Tatler_ and its followers undoubtedly did something toremove the reproach from prose fiction, and more to sharpen the appetitefor it. But they were nothing new: the short tale being of unknownantiquity. The "Coverley Papers" _were_ new and did much more. This newkind of treatment may not have suggested beforehand (it is not certainthat it did not) the extensive novel of character and manners--the playlengthened, bodied more strongly, and turned into narrative form. Butthe process was _there_; the instances of it were highly reputed andwidely known. It must in almost any case have gone hard but a furtherstep still would be taken. It was actually taken by the person who hadsuggested the periodical essay itself.

  Much has been written about Defoe, but, curiously enough, the least partof what has been written about him has concerned the very part of himthat is read--his novels. Nay, occasional eccentrics, and not onlythese, have shown a sort of disposition to belittle him as a novelist:indeed the stock description of Richardson as the Father of the EnglishNovel almost pointedly rules Defoe out. Yet further, the most adequateand intelligent appreciation of his novel work itself has too often beenmainly confined to what is no doubt a subject of exceeding interest--thespecial means by which he secures the attention, and procures thedelight, of his readers. We shall have to deal with this too. But thepoint to which it is wished to draw special attention now is different,and we may reach it best by the ordinary "statement of case."

  Almost everybody who knows any literary history, knows that the book bywhich, after thirty or forty years of restless publication in all sortsof prose and rhyme, Defoe niched himself immovably in Englishliterature, was a new departure by almost an old man. He was all but, ifnot quite, sixty when _Robinson Crusoe_ appeared: and a very fewfollowing years saw the appearance of his pretty voluminous "minor"novels. The subject of the first every one knows without limitation: itis not so certain, though vigorous efforts have been made to popularisethe others, that even their subjects are clearly known to many people._Captain Singleton_ (1720), _Moll Flanders_, and _Colonel Jack_ (both1722) are picaresque romances with tolerably sordid heroes and heroines,but with the style entirely rejuvenated by Defoe's secret. _Roxana_(1724), a very puzzling book which is perhaps not entirely his writing,is of the same general class: the _Voyage round the World_ (1725), theleast interesting, but not _un_interesting, is exactly what its titleimports,--in other words, the "stuffing" of the _Robinson_ pie withoutthe game. The _Memoirs of a Cavalier_ (1720) approach the historicalnovel (or at least the similar "stuffing" of that) and have raisedcurious and probably insoluble questions as to whether they areinventions at all--questions intimately connected with that general onereferred to above. One or two minor things are sometimes added to thelist: but they require no special notice. The seven books just mentionedare Defoe's contribution to the English novel. Let us consider thequality of this contribution first--and then the means used to attainit.

  Their novel-quality (which, as has been hinted, has not been claimed soloudly or so steadily as it should have been for Defoe) is the qualityof Story-Interest--and this, one dares say, he not only infused for thefirst time in full d
ose, but practically introduced into the Englishnovel, putting the best of the old mediaeval romances aside and alsoputting aside _The Pilgrim's Progress_, which is not likely to have beenwithout influence on himself. It may be said, "Oh! but the _Amadis_romances, and the Elizabethan novels, and the 'heroics' must haveinterested or they would not have been read." This looks plausible, butis a mistake. Few people who have not studied the history of criticismknow the respectable reluctance to be _pleased_ with literature whichdistinguished mankind till very recent times; and which in fact kept thenovel back or was itself maintained by the absence of the novel. In lifepeople pleased themselves irregularly enough: in literature they couldnot get out of the idea that they ought to be instructed, that it wasenough to be instructed, and that it was discreditable to ask for more.Even the poet was allowed to delight grudgingly and at his peril; wassuspected because he did delight, and had to pay a sort of heavylicence-duty for it, in the shape of concomitant instruction to othersand good behaviour in himself. In fact he was a publican who was boundto serve stodgy food as well as exhilarating drink.

  It is impossible to doubt that people were similarly affected to thefiction of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, at least in itslonger examples--for the smaller _novelle_ could amuse in their own waysometimes, though they could hardly absorb. It is equally impossible toimagine any one being "enthralled" by _Euphues_. Admiration, of a kind,must have been the only passion excited by it. In the _Arcadia_ there isa certain charm, but it belongs to the inset verse--to the almostSpenserian _visionariness_ of parts--to the gracious lulling atmosphereof the whole. If it had been published in three volumes, one cannotimagine the most enthusiastic novel-reader knocking up a friend late atnight for volume two or volume three. I have said that I can read_Parismus_ for pastime: but the pastime that it provides is certainlynot over-stimulating, and the mild stimulant becomes unsweetened andunlemoned barley-water in books of the _Parthenissa_ class. If with themconversing one forgets all time, it must be by the influence of thekind go-between Sleep. We know, of course, that their contemporaries didnot go to sleep over them: but it was because they felt that they werebeing done good to--that they were in the height of polite society--thattheir manners were being softened and not allowed to be gross. The time,in its blunt way, was fond of contrasting the attractions of a mistresson one side and "a friend and a bottle" on the other. That a novel couldenter into competition with either or both, as an interesting and evenexciting means of passing the time, would have entered very few heads atall and have been contemptuously dismissed from most of those that itdid enter.

  Addison and Steele in the "Coverley Papers" had shown the way toconstruct this new spell: Defoe actually constructed it. It may be thatsome may question whether the word "exciting" applies exactly to hisstories. But this is logomachy: and in fact a well-willing reader _can_get very fairly excited while the Cavalier is escaping after MarstonMoor; while it is doubtful whether the savages have really come and whatwill be the event; while it is again doubtful whether Moll is caught ornot; or what has become of those gains of the boy Jack, which can hardlybe called ill-gotten because there is such a perfect unconsciousness ofill on the part of the getter. At any rate, if such a reader cannot feelexcitement here, he would utterly stagnate in any previous novel.

  In presence of this superior--this emphatically and doubly"novel"--interest, all other things become comparatively unimportant.The relations of _Robinson Crusoe_ to Selkirk's experiences and to oneor two other books (especially the already mentioned _Isle of Pines_)may not unfitly employ the literary historian who chooses to occupyhimself with them. The allegory which Defoe alleges in it, and whichsome biographers have endeavoured to work out, cannot, I suppose, beabsolutely pooh-poohed, but presents no attractions whatever to thepresent writer. Whether the _Cavalier_ is pure fiction, or partlyembroidered fact, _is_ a somewhat interesting question, if only becauseit seems to be impossible to find out the answer: and the same may besaid of the not impossible (indeed almost more than probable) Portuguesemaps and documents at the back of _Captain Singleton_. To disembroil thechronological muddle of _Roxana_, and follow out the tangles of thehide-and-seek of that most unpleasant "lady of pleasure" and herdaughter, may suit some. But, apart from all these things, there abidesthe fact that you can _read_ the books--read them again and again--enjoythem most keenly at first and hardly less keenly afterwards, howeveroften you repeat the reading.

  As has been partly said, the means by which this effect is achieved, andalso the means by which it is not, are almost equally remarkable. TheFour Elements of the novel are sometimes, and not incorrectly, said tobe Plot, Character, Description, and Dialogue--Style, which some wouldmake a fifth, being rather a characteristic in another order ofdivision. It is curious that Defoe is rebellious or evasive under anyanalysis of this kind. His plots are of the "strong" order--the eventssucceed each other and are fairly connected, but do not compose ahistory so much as a chronicle. In character, despite his intenseverisimilitude, he is not very individual. Robinson himself, Moll, Jack,William the Quaker in _Singleton_, even Roxana the cold-blooded andcovetous courtesan, cannot be said not to be real--they and almost everyone of the minorities are an immense advance on the colourless andbloodless ticketed puppets of the Middle Fiction. But they still want_something_--the snap of the fingers of the artist. Moll is perhaps themost real of all of them and yet one has no flash-sights of herbeing--never sees her standing out against soft blue sky orthunder-cloud as one sees the great characters of fiction; never hearsher steps winding and recognises her gesture as one does theirs.

  So again his description is sufficient: and the enumerativeparticularity of it is even great part of the _secret de Polichinelle_to which we are coming. But it is far from elaborate in any other wayand has hardly the least decoration or poetical quality. Well as we knowCrusoe's Island the actual scenery of it is not half so much impressedas that even, for instance, of Masterman Ready's--it is either of thehuman figures--Crusoe's own grotesque bedizenment, the savages, Friday,the Spaniards, Will Atkins--or of the works of man--the stockade, theboat, and the rest--that we think. A little play is made with Jack'sglass-house squalor and Roxana's magnificence _de mauvais lieu_, but notmuch: the gold-dust and deserts of _Singleton_ are a necessary part ofthe "business," but nothing more. _Moll Flanders_--in some respects thegreatest of all his books--has the bareness of an Elizabethan stage inscenery and properties--it is much if Greenfield spares us a table or abed to furnish it.

  Of Dialogue Defoe is specially fond--even making his personagessoliloquise in this after a fashion--and it plays a very important partin "the secret:" yet it can hardly be classed very high _as_ dialogue.And this is at least partly due to the strange _drab_ shapelessness ofhis style, which never takes on any brilliant colour, or quaintindividual form.

  Yet it is very questionable whether any other style would have suitedthe method so well, or would even have suited it at all. For thismethod--to leave off hinting at it and playing round it--is one ofalmost endless accumulation of individually trivial incident, detail,and sometimes observation, the combined effect of which is to produce aninsensible but undoubting acceptance, on the reader's part, of the factspresented to him. The process has been more than once analysed in thatcurious and convenient miniature example of it, the "Mrs. Veal"_supercherie_: but you may open the novels proper almost anywhere anddiscover it in full operation. Like most great processes of art, this isan adoption and perfecting of habits usual with the most inartisticpeople--a turning to good account of the interminably circumstantialsuperfluities of the common gossip and newsmonger. Very often Defoeactually does not go beyond this--just as in _The Shortest Way with theDissenters_ he had simply reproduced the actual thoughts and wishes ofthose who disliked dissent. But sometimes he got the better of thisalso, as in the elaborate building up of Robinson's surroundings and nota little in the other books. And there the effect is not onlyverisimilar but wonderful in its verisimilitude. At any rate, in him,and for English
prose and secular fiction, we have first that mysteriouscharm of the _real that is not real_--of the "human creation"--whichconstitutes the appeal of the novel. In some of the books there ishardly any appeal of any other sort. Moll Flanders, though not unkindly,and "improper" rather from the force of circumstances than from anyspecially vicious inclination, is certainly not a person for whom onehas much liking. Colonel Jack, after his youthful experiences inpocket-picking, is rather a nonentity, something of a coward, a fellowof no particular wits, parts, or definite qualities of any kind. Singletonis a rascal who "plays Charlemagne," as the French gambling term has it,and endows his repentance with the profits of his sin. As for Roxana thereare few more repulsive heroines in fiction--while the Cavalier and thechief figure in the _Voyage Round the World_ are simply threads onwhich their respective adventures are strung. Even Robinson himself enlistsno particular sympathy except of the "put-yourself-in-his-place" kind. Yetthese sorry or negative personages, of whom, in the actual creation of God,we should be content to know nothing except from paragraphs in thenewspaper (and generally in the police-reports thereof), content usperfectly well with their company through hundreds and thousands ofsolid pages, and leave us perfectly ready to enjoy it again aftera reasonable interval.

  This, as has been said, is the mystery of fiction--a mystery partly seta-working in the mediaeval romance, then mostly lost, and nowrecovered--in his own way and according to his own capacity--by Defoe.It was to escape others for a little longer and then to be yet againrediscovered by the great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century--toslip in and out of hands during the later part of that century, and thento be all but finally established, in patterns for everlastingpursuance, by Miss Austen and by Scott. But Defoe is really (unless weput Bunyan before him) the first of the magicians--not the greatest byany means, but great and almost alone in the peculiar talent of makinguninteresting things interesting--not by burlesquing them or satirisingthem; not by suffusing or inflaming them with passion; not by givingthem the amber of style; but by serving them "simple of themselves" asthough they actually existed.

  The position of Defoe in novel history is so great that there is atemptation to end this chapter with him. But to do so would cause aninconvenience greater than any resulting advantages. For the greatest ofDefoe's contemporaries in English letters also comes into our division,and comes best here. One cannot conveniently rank Swift with the greatquartette of the next chapter, because he is a novelist "by interim" andincompletely: to rank him among the minor and later novelists of theeighteenth century would be as to the first part of the classificationabsurd and as to the last false. And he comes, not merely in time,pretty close to Defoe, incommensurable as is the genius of the two. Ithas even been thought (plausibly enough, though the matter is of nogreat importance) that the form of _Gulliver_ may have been to someextent determined by _Robinson Crusoe_ and Defoe's other novels oftravel. And there is a subtler reason for taking the pair together andboth close to Addison and Steele.

  Swift had shown the general set towards prose fiction, and his own bentin the same direction, long before Defoe's novel-period and as early asthe _Tale of a Tub_ and the _Battle of the Books_ (_published_ 1704 butcertainly earlier in part). The easy flow of the narrative, and thevivid dialogue of the Spider and the Bee in the latter, rank high amongthose premonitions of novel with which, in this place, we should bespecially busied. In the former Peter, Martin, and Jack want but alittle more of the alchemist's furnace to accomplish their projectioninto real characters, and not merely allegorical figure-heads. But, ofcourse, in both books, the satiric purpose dominates too much to allowthem to be really ranked among novels, even if they had taken thetrouble to clothe themselves with more of the novel-garb.

  With _Gulliver_ it is different. It is a commonplace on its subject(but like many other commonplaces a thing ill to forget or ignore) thatnatural and unsophisticated children always _do_, and that almostanybody who has a certain power of turning blind eyes when and where hechooses _can_, read it simply as a story of adventure and enjoy ithugely. It would be a most preternatural child or a most singularlyconstituted adult who could read _Utopia_ or _Oceana_, or even Cyrano's_Voyages_, "for the story" and enjoy them hugely. This means that Swifthad either learnt from Defoe or--and considering those earlierproductions of his own much more probably--had independently developedthe knack of _absorbing_ the reader--the knack of telling a story. Butof course there is in one sense much more, and in another much less,than a story in _Gulliver_: and the finest things in it are independentof story, though (and this once more comes in for our present purpose)they are quite capable of adaptation to story-purposes, and have been soadapted ever since by the greatest masters of the art. These are strokesof satire, turns of phrase, little illuminations of character, andseasonings of description. But the great point of _Gulliver_ is that,like Defoe's work, though in not quite the same way, it is_interesting_--that it takes hold of its reader and gives him its"peculiar pleasure." When a work of art does this, it is pretty nearperfection.

  There is, however, another book of Swift's which, though perhaps seldommentioned or even thought of in connection with the novel, is of realimportance in that connection, and comes specially in with our presentmain consideration--the way in which the several parts of the completednovel were being, as it were, separately got ready and set apart for theuse of the accomplished novelist. This is the very curious andagreeable piece called _Polite Conversation_ (1738), on which, though itwas not printed till late in his life and close on _Pamela_ itself,there is good reason for thinking that he had been for many yearsengaged. The importance of dialogue in the novel has been oftenmentioned and will scarcely be contested: while frequent occasion hasbeen taken to point out that it had hitherto been very ill-achieved.Swift's "conversation" though designedly _underlined_, as it were, toshow up current follies and extravagances of phrase and of fashiongenerally, is yet pretty certainly in the main the real averageconversation of the society of his time, which he knew well andthoroughly. Further, there is a distinct, though it may be almostimpalpable, difference between it and the conversation of the stage,though it is naturally connected therewith. Non-poetical stage dialoguein capable hands is either deliberate talking for display of "wit" likethat of Congreve, or is conditioned and directed by the necessities ofaction and character. Of course, novel conversation may diverge in thefirst direction, and cannot properly neglect the second altogether. But,as there is room for very much more of it, it may and should allowitself a considerably wider range and imitate, on proper occasions, thedesultory gossip and small talk of people who live on the "boards" of aroom-floor and not of a stage.

  This is just what Swift's does, and just what there is very little of inDefoe; almost necessarily less in Addison and his group because of theiressay form; and hardly anything elsewhere and earlier. Just as theCoverley Papers could, by one process and no difficult one, have beenthrown into a novel; so by another, a not much more difficult and a muchless complicated one, could the _Polite Conversation_ be thrown intopart of a novel--while in each case the incomplete and unintentionaldraft itself supplies patterns for the complete work in new kind such ashad never been given before. Indeed the _Conversation_ may almost besaid to _be_ part of a novel--and no small part--as it stands, and ofsuch a novel as had never been written before.

  But there was something still further all but absolutely necessary tothe novel, though not necessary to it alone, which Defoe, Addison, andSwift, each in his several way, worked mightily to supply: and that wasa flexible business-like "workaday" prose style. Not merely so long asmen aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of _Euphues_ and the_Arcadia_, but so long as the old splendid and gorgeous, but cumbrousand complicated pre-Restoration style lasted, romances were possible,but novels were not. You might indeed pick out of Shakespeare--especiallyfrom such parts as those of Beatrice, Rosalind, and some of the fools--acapital novel-style: but then you can pick almost anything out ofShakespeare. Elsewhere the constant presence
either of semi-poeticphraseology or of some kind of "lingo" was almost fatal. You want whatSprat calls a more "natural way of speaking" (though not necessarily a"naked" one) for novel purposes--a certain absence of ceremony and paradeof phrase: though the presence of slang and some other things, the rebukingof which was partly Swift's object in the _Conversation_, is _not_fatal, and so he, in a manner, blessed and prescribed what he meant to ban.

  Thus, by the early years of the reign of George II., or a little later,we find, on the one side, an evident, and variously thoughinarticulately proclaimed, desire for novels; on the other, theaccumulation, in haphazard and desultory way, of almost all the methods,the processes, the "plant," necessary to turn novels out; but hardlyanything except the considered work of Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift whichreally deserves the name of novel. A similar process had been going onin France; and, in the different work of Le Sage and Marivaux, hadactually produced work in the kind more advanced than anything inEnglish. But the tables were soon to be turned: and during the rest ofthe century the English Novel was at last to assert itself as adistinct, an increasingly popular, and a widely cultivated kind. Thatthis was due to the work of the four great novelists who fill itscentral third and will fill our next chapter cannot perhaps be said:that their work was the first great desertion of it may be said safely.