Table of Contents for The English Novel by George Saintsbury

   CHAPTER II - FROM LYLY TO SWIFT

During the dying-off of romance proper, or its transference from verse to prose in the late fifteenth and earlier sixteenth century, there is not very much to note about prose fiction in England.  But, as the conditions of modern literature fashioned themselves, a very great influence in this as in other departments was no doubt exercised with us by Italian, as well as some by Spanish in a way which may be postponed for a little.  The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer’s time:  but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth.  It is a hackneyed truism that Italian society was very much more modern than any other in Europe at this 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 it has ever been since ­or till very recently.  By “modern” is here meant the kind of society which is fairly cultivated, fairly comfortable, fairly complicated with classes not very sharply separated from each other, not dominated by any very high ideals, tolerably corrupt, and sufficiently business-like.  The Italian novella, of course, admits wild passions and extravagant crimes:  but the general tone of it is bourgeois ­at any rate domestic.  With its great number of situations and motives, presented in miniature, careful work is necessary to bring out the effect:  and, above all, there is abundant room for study of manners, for proverbial and popular wisdom and witticism, for “furniture” ­to use that word in a wide sense.  Above all, the Italian mind, like the Greek, had an ethical twist ­twist in more senses than one, some would say, but that does not matter.  Manners, morals, motives ­these three could not but displace, to some extent, mere incident:  though there was generally incident of a poignant or piquant kind as well.  In other words the novella was actually (though still in miniature) a novel in nature as well as in name.  And these novelle became, as is generally known, common in English translations after the middle of the sixteenth century.  Painter’s huge Palace of Pleasure (1566) is only the largest and best known of many translations, single and 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 of translated matter served a purpose ­great indeed, but somewhat outside their proper department ­by furnishing the Elizabethan dramatists with a large part ­perhaps the larger part ­of their subjects.  But they very soon began to exercise it directly by suggesting the fictitious part of the prose pamphlet ­a department which, though infinitely less well known than the plays, and still not very easy to know, holds almost the second position as representing the popular literature of the Elizabethan time.  And they also had ­in one case certainly, in the other probably ­no little influence upon the two great Elizabethan works which in a manner founded the modern novel and the modern romance in English ­the Euphues of Lyly and the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney.

The pamphlet stories (which are themselves often play-connected, as in the case of Lodge’s Rosalynde and Greene’s Pandosto) do not require much notice, with one exception ­Nash’s Jack Wilton or the Unfortunate Traveller, to which some have assigned a position equal, or perhaps superior in our particular subject, to that of the Arcadia or that of Euphues.  This seems to the present writer a mistake:  but as to appear important is (in a not wholly unreal sense) to be so, the piece shall be separately considered.  The rest are mostly marred by a superabundance of rather rudimentary art, and a very poor allowance of matter.  There is hardly any character, and except in a few pieces, such as Lodge’s Margarite of America, there is little attempt to utilise new scenes and conditions.  But the whole class has special interest for us in one peculiarity which makes it perhaps unreadable to any but students, and that is its saturation with the Elizabethan conceit and word-play which is sometimes called Euphuism.  Nor is this wonderful, considering that more than one of these “pamphlets” is directly connected with the matter and 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 at all; and some of these some have been almost indignant at its being called one.  It is certainly, with Rasselas, the most remarkable example, in English, of a novel which is to a great extent deprived of the agremens to which we have for some two centuries been accustomed in the kind, and, to a still greater, loaded with others which do not appeal to us.  To put aside altogether its extraordinary and in a way epoch-making style, which gives it its main actual place in the history of English literature, it is further loaded with didactic digressions which, though certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in the kind, have never been quite equalled ­no, not in Rasselas itself or the Fool of Quality.  But if anybody, who has the necessary knowledge to understand, and therefore the necessary patience to tolerate, these knotty knarry envelopes, insertions, and excrescences, will for the moment pay no attention to them, but merely strip them off, he will find the carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind.  The first plot of Philautus ­Euphues ­Lucilla, and the successive jilting of the two friends for each other and for Curio, is no mean novel-substance.  Not Balzac himself, certainly no one of his successors, need disdain it:  and more than one of them has taken up something like it.  The journey from Naples to London, and the episode of Fidus and Iffida, could have been worked up, in the good old three-volume days, to a most effective second volume.  And the picture of the court, with the further loves of Philautus, Camilla, and the “violet” Frances, would supply a third of themselves even if Euphues were left out, though some livelier presentation of his character (which Lyly himself was obviously too much personally interested to make at all clear) would improve the whole immensely.  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 the outlines, of this thing were indicated and vaguely sketched earlier in any European language, unless it be the Lucretia and Euryalus of AEneas Silvius, 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 if it were more of a piece.  The quicquid agunt homines is as much the province of the novel as of the satire; and there is more than something of this as it affected Elizabethan times in Euphues.  Men’s interest in morals, politics, and education; their development of the modern idea of society; their taste for letters; their conceits and fancies ­all these appear 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, it deserves the highest respect for this, and like most other things sui generis it was destined to propagate the genus, if only after many days.  The Arcadia was in intention certainly, and to great extent in actual fact, merely a carrying out of the attempt, common all over Europe (as a result of the critical searchings of heart of the Italians), to practise a new kind ­the Heroic Romance of the sub-variety called pastoral.  The “heroic” idea generally was (as ought to be, but perhaps is not, well known) to blend, after a fashion, classical and romantic characteristics ­to substitute something like the classic unity of fable or plot for the mere “meandering” of romantic story, and to pay at least as much attention to character as the classics had paid, instead of neglecting it altogether, as had recently though not always been the case in Romance.  But the scheme retained on the other hand the variety of incident and appeal of this latter:  and especially assigned to Love the high place which Romance had given it.  As for the Pastoral ­that is almost a story to itself, and a story which has been only once (by Mr. W.W.  Greg) satisfactorily, and then not quite completely, told.  It is enough to say here, and as affecting our own subject, that it supplied a new opportunity of gratifying the passion of the Renaissance for imitating antiquity, at the same time permitting to no small extent the introduction of things that were really romantic, and above all providing a convention.  The Heroic romance generally and the Pastoral in particular went directly back to the Greek romances of Heliodorus and Longus:  but they admitted many new and foreign elements.

At the same time, bastard as the heroic romance was, it could not but exercise an important influence on the future of fiction, inasmuch as it combined, or attempted to combine, with classical unity and mediaeval variety the more modern interest of manners and (sometimes) personality.  Sidney’s attempt (which, it must be remembered, is not certainly known to be wholly his as it stands, and is certainly known not to have been revised by him for publication) exercised a very great influence in English.  For its popularity was enormous, and it doubtless served as shoehorn to draw on that of the English translations of French and Spanish romance which supplied, during the greater part of the seventeenth century, the want of original composition of the kind.  The unconscionable amount of talk and of writing “about it and about it” which Euphues and the minor Euphuist romances display is at least as prominent in the Arcadia:  and this talk rarely takes a form congenial to the modern novel reader’s demands.  Moreover, though there really is a plot, and a sufficient amount of incident, this reader undoubtedly, and to no small extent justly, demands that both incident and plot shall be more disengaged from their framework ­that they should be brought into higher relief, should stand out more than is the case.  Yet further, the pure character-interest is small ­is almost nonexistent:  and the rococo-mosaic of manners and sentiment which was to prove the curse of the heroic romance generally prevents much interest being felt in that direction. It would also be impossible to devise a style less suited to prose narrative, except of a very peculiar kind and on a small scale, than that either of Euphues or of the Arcadia, which, though an uncritical tradition credits it with driving out Lyly’s, is practically only a whelp of the same litter.  Embarrassed, heavy, rhetorical, it has its place in the general evolution of English prose, and a proper and valuable place too.  But it is bad even for pure romance purposes:  and nearly hopeless for the panoramic and kaleidoscopic variety which should characterise the novel.  To the actual successors of the Arcadia in English we shall come presently.

The Unfortunate Traveller is of much less importance than the other two.  It has obtained such reputation as it possesses, partly because of its invention or improvement of the fable of “Surrey and Geraldine”; more, and more justly, because it does work up a certain amount of historical material ­the wars of Henry VIII. in French Flanders ­into something premonitory (with a little kindness on the part of the premonished) of the great and long missed historical novel; still more for something else.  Nash, with his quick wit, seems to have been really the first to perceive the capabilities of that foreign travel and observation of manners which was becoming common, stripped of the special atmosphere of pilgrimage which had formerly enveloped it.  Even here, 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 much difficulty in claiming the book as one of the tribe of Euphuist pamphlets.  But Jack Wilton the “traveller” is a little more of a person than the pedagogic Euphues and the shadowy Philautus.  At any rate he has a very strong anticipation of Defoe, whose “Cavalier” was not improbably suggested by him.  But Nash has neither the patience of Defoe, nor that singular 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 the time, from the crowned heads of the period, through Luther and Aretine downwards, to give bait and attraction.  Sometimes it reminds one of a working up of the Colloquies of Erasmus:  three centuries earlier than The Cloister and the Hearth, with much less genius than Charles Reade’s, and still more without his illegitimate advantage of actual novels behind him for nearly half the time.  But it gives us “disjectae membra novellae” rather than a novel itself:  and the oftener one reads it the more clear one is that the time for writing novels had not yet come.  The materials are there; the desire to utilise ­and even a faint vague idea of how to utilise ­them is there; but the art is almost completely 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 one which has been very little dealt with.  Dunlop neglected it rather surprisingly, and until Professor Raleigh’s chapter on the subject there was little of a satisfactory kind to be found about it anywhere.  It must, however, be admitted that the abstainers from it have been to some extent justified in their abstention.  The subject is a curious one:  and it has an important place in the history of the Novel, because it shows at once how strong was the nisus towards prose fiction and how surprisingly difficult writers seem, nevertheless, to have found it to hit upon anything really good, much more anything really original in kind.  For it is hardly too much to say that this century of attempt ­we cannot call it a century of invention ­from Ford to Congreve, does not add a single piece of any considerable merit to the roll of English books.  As for a masterpiece, there is nothing in respect of which the use of such a word would not be purely ridiculous.  And yet the attempts are interesting to the historian, and should not be uninteresting to the historical student of literature.  One or two of them have a sort of shadowy name and place in literary history already.

In tracing their progress and character, we must allow for two native models:  and for three foreign sources, one ancient, two modern, of influence. The Arcadia and Euphues, the former continuously, the latter by revival after an interval, exercised very great effect in the first half of the seventeenth century, during at least the earlier part of which the vogue of Amadis and its successors, as Englished by Anthony Munday and others, likewise continued.  The Greek romances also had much to do with the matter:  for the Elizabethan translators had introduced them to the vulgar, and the seventeenth century paid a good deal of attention to Greek.  Then, when that century itself was on its way, the pastoral romance of D’Urfe first, and the Calprenede-Scudery productions in the second place, came to give a fresh impulse, and something of a new turn.  The actual translations of French and Spanish romance, shorter and longer, good, bad, and indifferent, are of immense bulk and doubtless excited imitation:  but we cannot possibly deal with them here.  A bare list would fill a chapter.  But some work of more or less (generally less) originality, in at least adaptation, calls for a little individual notice:  and some general characterisation may be added.

It may be desirable to prelude the story by a reminder to the reader that the general characteristics of these various sources were “harlequin” in their diversity of apparent colour.  The Amadis romances and, indeed, all the later examples of that great kind, such as Arthur of Little Britain, which Berners translated, were distinguished on the one side by a curious convention of unsmooth running of the course of love, on the other sometimes by a much greater licence of morality than their predecessors, and always by a prodigality of the “conjuror’s supernatural” ­witches and giants and magic black and white.  The Spanish “picaresque” story was pretty real but even less decent:  and its French imitations (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 most scrupulous propriety in language and situation:  but aggravated the Amadisian troubling of the course of true love, and complicated everything, very frequently if not invariably, by an insinuated “key” interest of identification of the ancient personages selected as heroes and heroines with modern personages of quality and distinction.

Emanuel Ford (whom the British Museum catalogue insists on spelling Ford_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 be popular in abridged and chap-booked form far into the eighteenth century. (It is sometimes called Parismus and Parismenus:  the second part being, as very commonly in romances of the class after the Amadis pattern, occupied largely with the adventures of the son of the hero of the first.) On the whole, Parismus, though it has few pretensions to elegance of style, and though some delicate tastes have been shocked at certain licences of incident, description, and phrase in it, is quite the 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 editions side by side with Parismus himself, who is rather a “jolly gentleman”) is won with much less difficulty and in much less time than Oriana ­but separations and difficulties duly follow in “desolate isles” and the like.  And though Parismus himself is less of an Amadis than Amadis, the “contrast of friends,” founded by that hero and Galaor, is kept up by his association with a certain Pollipus ­“a man of his hands” if ever there was one, for with them he literally wrings the neck of the enchantress Bellona, who has enticed him to embrace her.  There is plenty of the book, as there always should be in its kind (between 400 and 500 very closely printed quarto pages), and its bulk is composed of proportionately plentiful fighting and love-making and of a very much smaller proportion of what schoolboys irreverently call “jaw” than is usual in the class.  If it were not for the black letter (which is trying to the eyes) I should not myself object to have no other reading than Parismus for some holiday evenings, or even after pretty tough days of literary and professional work. The Famous History of Montelion, the Knight of the Oracle (1633?) proclaims its Amadisian type even more clearly:  but I have only read it in an abridged edition of the close of the century.  I should imagine that in extenso it was a good deal duller than Parismus.  And of course the comparative praise which has been given to that book must be subject to the reminder that it is what it is ­a romance of disorderly and what some people call childish adventure, and of the above-ticketed “conjuror’s supernatural.”  If anybody cannot read Amadis itself, he certainly will not read Parismus:  and perhaps not everybody who can manage the original ­perhaps not even everybody who can manage Palmerin ­could put up with Ford’s copy.  I can take this Ford as I find him:  but I am not sure that I would go much lower.

Ornatus and Artesia (1607?), on the other hand ­his second or third book ­strikes me as owing more to Heliodorus than to Montalvo, or Lobeira, or whoever was the author of the great romance of the last chivalric type.  There are more intricacies in it; the heroine plays a rather more important part; there is even something of a nearer approach to modern novel-ways in this production, which reappeared at “Grub Street near the Upper Pump” in the year 1650.  Ornatus sees his mistress asleep and in a kind of deshabille, employs a noble go-between, Adellena (a queer spelling of “Adelina” which may be intentional), is rejected with apparent indignation, of course; writes elaborate letters in vain, but overhears Artesia soliloquising confession of her love for him and disguises himself as a girl, Silvia.  Then the villain of the piece, Floretus, to obtain the love of this supposed Silvia, murders a person of distinction and plots to poison Artesia herself.  Ornatus-Silvia is banished:  and all sorts of adventures and disguises follow, entirely in the Greek style.  The book is not very long, extending only to signature R in a very small quarto.  Except that it is much less lively and considerably less “free,” it reminds one rather in type of Kynaston’s verse Leoline and Sydanis.  In fact the verse and prose romances of the time are very closely connected:  and Chamberlayne’s Pharonnida ­far the finest production of the English “heroic” school in prose, verse, or drama ­was, when the fancy for abridging set in, condensed into a tiny prose Eromena.  But Ornatus and Artesia, if more modern, more decent, and less extravagant than Parismus, is nothing like so interesting to read.  It is indeed quite possible that there is, if not in it, in its popularity, a set-back to the Arcadia itself, which had been directly followed in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621), and to which (by the time of the edition noted) Charles I.’s admiration ­so indecently and ignobly referred to by Milton ­had given a fresh attraction for all good anti-Puritans.  That an anti-Puritan should be a romance-lover was almost a necessity.

When the French “heroics” began to appear it was only natural that they should be translated, and scarcely less so that they should be imitated in England.  For they were not far off the Arcadia pattern:  and they were a distinct and considerable effort to supply the appetite for fiction which has been dwelt upon.  But except for this, and for fashion’s sake, they did not contain much that would appeal to an English taste:  and it is a little significant that one great reader of them who is known to us ­Mrs. Pepys ­was a Frenchwoman.  Indeed, save for the very considerable “pastime” of a kind that they gave to a time, much of which required passing, it is difficult to understand their attraction for English readers.  Their interminable talk never (till perhaps 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 the imitations are the work of men of mark in their different ways.  These are the Parthenissa (1654) of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill and Earl of Orrery; the Aretina (1661) of Sir George Mackenzie; and the Pandion and Amphigeneia (1665) of “starch Johnny” Crowne.

Boyle was a strong Francophile in literature, and his not inconsiderable influence on the development of the heroic play showed it only less decidedly than his imitation of the Scudery romance.  I cannot say that I have read Parthenissa through:  and I can say that I do not intend to do so.  It is enough to have read Sainte Madeleine of the Ink-Desert herself, without reading bad imitations of her.  But I have read enough to know that Parthenissa would never give me anything like the modified satisfaction that is given by Parismus:  and after all, if a man will not take the trouble to finish writing his book (which Orrery never did) why should his readers take the trouble even to finish reading what he has written?  The scene is Parthia, with alternation to Syria, and diversions and episodes elsewhere:  and though there is a certain amount of fighting, the staple is quite decorous but exceedingly dull love-making, conducted partly in the endless dialogue (or rather automatic monologue) already referred to, and partly in letters more “handsome” even than Mr. Frank Churchill’s, and probably a good deal more sincere in their conventional way, but pretty certainly less amusing.  The original attraction indeed of this class of novel consisted, and, in so far as it still exists, may be said to consist, in noble sentiment, elegantly expressed.  It deserved, and in a manner deserves, the commendatory part of Aramis’s rebuke to Porthos for expressing impatience with the compliments between Athos and D’Artagnan at their first and hostile rencounter. Otherwise there is not much to be said for it.  It does not indeed deserve Johnson’s often quoted remark as to Richardson (on whom when we come to him we shall have something more to say in connection with these heroic romances), if any one were to read Parthenissa for the story he would not, unless he were a very impulsive person, “hang himself.”  He would simply, after a number of pages varying with the individual, cease to read it.

The work of the great Lord Advocate who was traduced by Covenanting malice is in a certain sense more interesting:  and that not merely because it is much shorter. Aretina or The Serious Romance, opens with an “apology for Romances” generally, which goes far to justify Dryden’s high opinion of Mackenzie as a critic.  But it cannot be said to be much ­it is a little ­more interesting as a story than Parthenissa, and it is written in a most singular lingo ­not displaying the racy quaintness of Mackenzie’s elder contemporary and fellow-loyalist Urquhart, but a sort of Scotified and modernised Euphuism rather terrible to peruse.  A library is “a bibliotheck richly tapestried with books.”  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 in Death’s livery, and by them opens a sallyport to his soul to fly out of that nasty prison.”  A certain zest may be given by these oddities, but it hardly lasts out more than 400 pages:  and though the lives of Aretina and Philaretes are more simply and straightforwardly told than might be thought likely ­though there are ingenious disguises of contemporary politics, and though Mackenzie was both a wise man and a wit ­it is more certain than ever, when we close his book, that this is not the way of the world, nor the man to walk in that way.

Pandion and Amphigeneia is the inferior in importance of both these books.  Crowne had perhaps rather more talent than it is usual to credit him with, but he does not show it here.  I think Sir Walter Raleigh is quite 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’s scheme ­which, it is fair once more to observe, we do not possess in any form definitely settled by its author ­with none of the merits of his ornament, his execution, and his atmosphere of poetic fancy.

The fact is that this heroic romance was foredoomed to inefficiency.  It was not a genuine kind at all:  but a sort of patchwork of imitations of 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 no time, to no country, to no system of manners, life, or thought.  Its oldest ancestor in one sense, though not in another ­the Greek romance ­was itself the growth of the latest and most artificial period of the literature to which it belonged.  The pure mediaeval romance of chivalry was another, but of this it had practically nothing left.  The Amadis class, the late Renaissance pastorals, the immediately preceding or accompanying French romances of the Scudery type, were, in increasing degree, hybrid, artificial, and dead-alive.  Impotence and sterility in every sense could but be its portion.  Of the two great qualities of the novel ­Variety and Life ­it had never succeeded in attaining any considerable share, and it had now the merest show of variety and no life at all.  There is hardly anything to be said in its favour, except that its vogue, as has been observed, testified to the craving for prose fiction, and kept at least a simulacrum of that fiction before the public.  How far there may be any real, though metaphysical, connection between the great dramatic output of this seventeenth century in England and its small production in novel is a question not to be discussed here.  But undoubtedly the fact of the contrast is a “document in the case,” and one of the most important in its own direction; completing the testimony of the mediaeval period in the other (that as romance dwindled, drama grew) and leading up to that of the eighteenth century when drama dwindled and the novel grew.  The practice of Afra Behn in both, and the fact that Congreve, the greatest English dramatist of the close of the century, began with a novel and deserted the style for drama, are also interesting, and combine themselves very apparently with the considerations just glanced at.  But Congreve and Afra must be postponed for a moment.

The two last discussed books, with Eromena and some others, are posterior to the Restoration in date, but somewhat earlier in type.  The reign of Charles II., besides the “heroic” romances and Bunyan, and one most curious little production to be noticed presently, is properly represented in fiction by two writers, to whom, by those who like to make discoveries, considerable importance has sometimes been assigned in the history of the English Novel.  These are Richard Head and Afra Behn, otherwise “the divine Astraea.”  It is, however, something of an injustice to class them together:  for Afra was a woman of very great ability, with a suspicion of genius, while Head was at the very best a bookmaker of not quite the lowest order, though pretty near it.  Of The English Rogue (1665-1680), which earns him his place here, only the first part, and a certain section of the fourth, are even attributed to him by Francis Kirkman, the Curll of his generation, who published the thing at intervals and admittedly wrote parts of it himself.  It is quite openly a picaresque novel:  and imitated not merely from the Spanish originals but from Sorel’s Francion, which had appeared in France some forty years before.  Yet, if we compare this latter curious book with Head’s we shall see how very far behind, even with forty years’ advantage in time, was the country which, in the next century, was practically to create the modern novel. Francion is not a work of genius:  and it does not pretend to much more than the usual picaresque farrago of adventure, unmoral and sometimes rather cruel, but comic of a kind, strung together with little art in fable, and less in character.  But the author is to some extent “cumbered about serving.”  He names his characters, tries to give them some vague personality, furnishes them with some roughly and sketchily painted scenery, and gives us not merely told tales, but occasionally something distantly resembling conversation.  Head takes no trouble of this kind:  and Kirkman does not seem to think that any such thing is required of him.  Very few of the characters of The English Rogue have so much as a name to their backs:  they are “a prentice,” “a master,” “a mistress,” “a servant,” “a daughter,” “a tapster,” etc.  They are invested with hardly the slightest individuality:  the very hero is a scoundrel as characterless as he is nameless: he is the mere thread which keeps the beads of the story together after a fashion.  These beads themselves, 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 flung together in gross, chiefly by the excessively clumsy and unimaginative expedient of making the personages tell long strings of them as their own experience.  When anything more is wanted, accounts of the manners of foreign countries, taken from “voyage-and-travel” books; of the tricks of particular trades (as here of piratical book-selling); of anything and everything that the writer’s dull fancy can think of, are foisted in.  The thing is in four volumes, and it seems that a fifth was intended as a close:  but there is no particular reason why it should not have extended to forty or fifty, nay to four or five hundred.  It could have had no real end, just as it has no real beginning or middle.

One other point deserves notice.  The tone of the Spanish and French picaresque novel had never been high:  but it is curiously degraded in this English example.  Furetiere honestly called his book Roman Bourgeois.  Head might have called his, if he had written in French, Roman Canaille.  Not merely the sentiments but the very outward trappings and accidents of gentility are banished from the book.  Yet we do not get any real reality in compensation.  Head is no Defoe:  he can give us the company that Colonel Jack kept in his youth and Moll Flanders in her middle age:  but he makes not the slightest attempt to give us Moll or Jack, or even Moll’s or Jack’s habit, environment, novel-furniture of any kind whatsoever.  The receipt to make The English Rogue is simply this:  “Take from two to three dozen Elizabethan pamphlets of different kinds, but principally of the ‘coney-catching’ variety, and string them together by making a batch of shadowy personages 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 and substance, it is difficult to see any advance whatever in this muck-heap ­which the present writer, having had to read it a second time for the present purpose, most heartily hopes to be able to leave henceforth undisturbed on his shelves.

Not in this fashion must the illustrious Afra be spoken of.  It is true that ­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 ­there has sometimes been a tendency rather to overdo praise of her, not merely in reference to her lyrics, some of which can never be praised too highly, but in reference to these novels. Oroonoko or The Royal Slave, with its celebration of the virtues of a noble negro and his love for his Imoinda, and his brutal ill-treatment and death by torture at the hands of white murderers, undoubtedly took the fancy of the public.  But to see at once Rousseau and Byron in it, Chateaubriand and Wilberforce 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 their matter; Afra had herself been in Guiana; and, as she was of a very inflammable disposition, it is quite possible that some Indian Othello had caught her fresh imagination.  On the other hand, there was the heroic romance, with all its sighs and flames, still the rage:  and a much less nimble intellect than Afra’s, with a much less cosmopolitan experience, might easily see the use of transposing it into a new key.  Still, there is no doubt that The Royal Slave and even its companions are 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 or expansion; less “talk about it” and more actual conversation; a stronger projection of character and other things; is merely to say that it is an experiment in the infancy of the novel, not a following out of secrets already divulged.  It certainly is the first prose story in English which can 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 King of Bantam,” for instance, is the account of an “extravagant,” though not quite a fool, who is “coney-catched” in the old manner.  But it opens in a fashion very different indeed from the old manner.  “This money is certainly a most devilish thing!  I’m sure the want of it had been like to ruin my dear Philibella!” and the succeeding adventures are pretty freshly told.  The trick of headlong overture was a favourite with Afra.  “The Adventure of the Black Lady” begins, “About the beginning of last June, 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:  but the line which separates trick from artistic device is an exceedingly narrow and winding one.  At any rate, this plunging into the middle of things 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,” a Bandello-like story, begins with an exaltation of Love:  and so on.  Now these things, though they may seem matters of course to the mere modern reader, were not matters of course then.  Afra very likely imitated; her works have never been critically edited; and have not served as field for much origin-hunting.  But whether she followed others or not, she led her own division.  All these things and others are signs of an awakened conscience ­of a sense of the fact that fiction, to be literature, must be something more than the relation of a bare fact, tragic, comic, or neutral ­that the novelist is a cook, and must prepare and serve his materials with a sauce as much his own as possible, of plot, arrangement, character-drawing, scenery, conversation, reflection, and what not.  That conversation itself ­the subtlest instrument of all and the most effective for constructing character ­is so little developed, can only, I think, be accounted for by supposing Afra and others to be under the not unnatural mistake that conversation especially belonged to the drama, which was still the most popular form of literature, and in which she herself was a copious practitioner.  But this mistake was not long to prevail:  and it had no effect on that great contemporary of hers who would, it is to be feared, have used the harshest language respecting her, and to whom we now come.

It is impossible to share, and not very easy even to understand, the scruples of those who would not admit John Bunyan to a place in the hierarchy and the pedigree of the English novel, or would at best grant him an outside position in relation to it.  Their exquisite reasons, so far 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 they are allegories. It may be humbly suggested that by applying the double rule to verse we can exclude Paradise Lost and the Faerie Queene from the succession of English Poetry, whereby no doubt we shall be finely holden in understanding the same:  while it is by no means certain that, if the exclusion of allegory be pushed home, we must not cancel Don Quixote from the list of the world’s novels.  Even in prose, to speak plainly, the hesitation ­unless it comes from the foolish dislike to things religious, as such, which has been the bigotry of the last generation or two ­comes from the almost equally foolish determination to draw up arbitrary laws of literary kind.  Discarding prejudice and punctilio, every one must surely see that, in diminishing measure, even The Holy War is a novel, and that The Pilgrim’s Progress has every one of the four requisites ­plot, character, description, and dialogue ­while one of these requisites ­character with its accessory manners ­is further developed in the History of Mr. Badman after a fashion for which we shall look vainly in any division of European literature (except drama) before it.  This latter fact has indeed obtained a fair amount of recognition since Mr. Froude drew the attention 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 must have struck careful readers of the great tinker’s minor works long before.  Indeed there are very good internal reasons for thinking that no less a person than Thackeray must have known Mr. Badman.  This wonderful little sketch, however ­the related history of a man who is an utter rascal both in family and commercial relations, but preserves his reputation intact and does not even experience any deathbed repentance ­is rather an unconscious study for a character in a novel ­a sketch of a bourgeois Barnes Newcome ­than anything more.  It has the old drawback of being narrated, not acted or spoken at first hand:  and so, though it is in a sense Fielding at nearly his best, more than half a century before Fielding attempted Joseph Andrews, no more need be said of it.  So, too, the religious element and the allegory are too prominent in The Holy War ­the novelist’s desk is made too much of a pulpit in large parts of it.  Other parts, concerning the inhabitants of Mansoul and their private affairs, are domestic novel-writing of nearly the pure kind:  and if The Pilgrim’s Progress did not exist, it would be worth while to pick them out and discuss them.  But, as it most fortunately does exist, this is not needful.

The only fault with the novel-character of the greater book which might possibly be found by a critic who did not let the allegory bite him, and was not frightened by the religion, is that there is next to no love element in it, though there are wedding bells.  Mercy is indeed quite nice enough for a heroine:  but Bunyan might have bestowed her better than on a young gentleman so very young that he had not long before made himself (no doubt allegorically) ill with unripe and unwholesome fruit.  But if he had done so, the suspicions of his brethren ­they were acute enough as it was not to mistake the character of the book, whatever modern critics may do ­would have been even more unallayable.  And, as it is, the “alluring countenance” does shed not a little grace upon the story, or at least upon the Second Part:  while the intenser character of the First hardly requires this.  Any other lack is, to the present writer, imperceptible.  The romance interest of quest, adventure, achievement, is present to the fullest degree:  and what is sometimes called the pure novel interest of character and conversation is present in a degree not lower.  It must be accepted as a great blessing, even by those who regard Puritanism as an almost unmitigated curse, that its principles forbade Bunyan to think of choosing the profane and abominable stage-play as the form of his creation.  We had had our fill of 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 amount of actual “Tig and Tirry” dialogue (as Dr. Johnson would say) is probably one of the things which have made precisians shy of accepting the Progress for what it really is.  But we must remember that this encroachment on the dramatic province was exactly what was wanted to remove the reproach of fiction.  The inability to put actual conversation of a lively kind in the mouths of personages has been indicated as one of the great defects of the novel up to this time.  Except Cervantes, it is difficult to think of any novelist who had shown himself able to supply the want.  Bunyan can do it as few have done it even since his time.  The famous dialogue of Christian and By-ends is only the best ­if it is the best ­of scores nearly or quite as good.  The curious intellectual flaccidity of the present day seems to be “put off” by the “ticket” names; but no one who has the true literary sense cares for these one way or another, or is more disturbed by them than if they were Wilkins and Jones.  Just as Coleridge observed that to enjoy some kinds of 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, knows but the Deity.  But the best of us would be hard put to it to make By-ends reveal his By-endishness more perfectly than he does by his conversation, and without any ticket-name at all.

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

Yet all these things are ­as they should be ­only subsidiary to the main interest of the Pilgrimage itself.  Once more, one may fear that it is no good sign of the wits of the age that readers should be unable to discard familiarity with the argument of the story.  It is the way in which that argument is worked out and illustrated that is the thing.  I have never myself, since I became thoroughly acquainted with Lydgate’s Englishing of Deguilevile’s Pilgrimage of the Soul of Man, had any doubt that ­in some way or other, direct or indirect, at tenth or twentieth hand perhaps ­Bunyan was acquainted with it:  but this is of no importance.  He might undoubtedly have got all his materials straight out of the Bible.  But his working of them up is all his own, and is wonderful.  Here, to begin with, is the marvel not merely of a continuation which is not a falling off, but of a repetition of the same general scheme with different but closely connected personages, which is entirely free from monotony.  One is so accustomed to the facts that perhaps it hardly strikes one at first how extraordinarily audacious the attempt is:  nay, the very success of it may blind all but critics to the difficulty.  It is no wonder that people tried further continuations and further complications:  still less wonder that they utterly failed.  Probably even Bunyan himself could not have “done it a third time.”  But he did it these twice with such vividness of figure and action; such completeness of fable; such sufficiency of behaviour and of speech as have 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 prose narrative, bringing the thoughts and actions and characters and speech of fictitious human beings before his readers ­for their inspection perhaps; for their delight certainly.  If this is not the being and the doing of a novelist this deponent very humbly declareth that he knoweth not what the being and the doing of a novelist are.

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

In 1668 there appeared a very curious little book (entitled at great length after the manner of the times, but more shortly called The Isle of Pines), which is important in the literary ancestry of Defoe and Swift and not unimportant in itself.  Its author was Henry Neville, of the Nevilles of Billingbeare, son of one Sir Henry and grandson of another, the grandfather having been of some mark in diplomacy and courtiership in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times.  The grandson had had a life of some stir earlier.  Born in 1620, and educated at Merton and University Colleges, he had left Oxford without a degree, had taken the Parliamentary side, but as a rigid Republican and anti-Cromwellite; had been a member of the Rota, and after the Restoration had been arrested in 1663 for supposed treasonable practices, but escaped serious punishment.  He lived quietly for more than thirty years longer and died in 1694.  Besides The Isle of Pines he wrote satirical tracts (the Parliament of Ladies being the best known), translated Machiavelli, and was evidently a man of parts, though, like his friend Harrington, something of a “crank.”  He seems also to have been, as some others of the extremer Puritans certainly were, pretty loose in his construction of moral laws.

The Isle is a very short book of thirty-one quarto pages:  but there is a good deal in it, and it must have been very carefully written.  A certain Cornelius van Sloetten writes, “supported by letters from Amsterdam,” how a Dutch ship, driven far out of reckoning in the Southern Ocean, comes to a “fourth island, near Terra Australis Incognita,” which is inhabited by white people, speaking English, but mostly naked.  The headman is a certain William Pine, whose grandfather, George, has left a written account of the origin of the community.  This relates how George was wrecked on the island, the ship perishing “with man and mouse,” except himself, his master’s daughter, two white maidservants, and a negro girl.  The island proves pleasant and habitable:  and George, to prevent unfairness and ill-feeling, unites himself to all his female companions, the quintet living in perfect harmony.  Thirty-seven children result:  and these at first necessarily intermarry; but after this first generation, a rule is made that brothers and sisters may not unite ­the descendants of the four original wives forming clans who may marry into the others but not into their own.  A wider legal code of fair stringency is arranged, with the sanction of capital and other punishments:  and things go so well that the patriarch musters a tribe of 565 persons by the time he is sixty, and of 1789 twenty years later, when he departs this life, piously praying God “to multiply them and send them the true report of the gospel.”  The multiplication has duly taken place, and there is something like a civil war while the Dutch are there; but they interfere with fire-arms to restore order, and leave all well.  The writer’s cunning is shown by the fact that he does not stop abruptly:  but finishes off with some 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.  But it 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 travels of course supplied him with his technical and geographical details:  and the codification of the Isle of Pines suggests the Bacon-Harrington tradition.  But he has got the vividness and realism which have usually been lacking before:  and though some of his details are pretty “free” it is by no means only through such things that these qualities are secured.  To Cyrano de Bergerac he bears no likeness at all.  In fact, though Neville was a satirist, satire does not seem to have been in any way his object here.  Whatever that object may have been, he has certainly struck, by accident or not, on the secret of producing an interesting account by ingeniously multiplied and adjusted detail.  Moreover, as there is no conversation, the book stands ­accidentally this time almost without doubt ­at the opposite pole from the talk-deluged romances of the Scudery type.  Whether Defoe actually knew it or not matters exceedingly little:  that something of his method, and in a manner the subject of his first and most famous novel, are here before him, seems quite indisputable.  Perhaps not the least piquant thing to do with The Isle of Pines is to contrast it with Oceana.  Of course the contrast is unfair:  nearly all contrasts are.  But there is actually, as has been pointed out, a slight contact between the work of the two friends:  and their complete difference in every other respect makes this more curiously apparent.  And another odd thing is that Neville ­“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 that requires special notice, belongs much more to the class of Afra’s tales than to that of the heroic romances.  It is a short story of seventy-five small pages only and of the Italian-Spanish imbroglio type.  The friends Aurelian and Hippolito take each other’s names for certain purposes, and their beloveds, “Incognita,” Juliana and Leonora, are perplexed accordingly:  while family feuds, letter assignations at a convent where the name of the convent unluckily happens to be torn off, and other stock ingredients of the kind are freely used.  Most writers have either said nothing about the book or have given it scanty praise; with the exception, Sir Walter Raleigh, I confess that I cannot here agree.  Being Congreve’s it could not be quite without flashes of wit, but they do not appear 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 is no character that I can see.  It is in fact only one of a vast multitude of 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 not yet 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 but over too, before the way was, to any important extent, further explored:  but important assistance in the exploration was given at the beginning of the second of these decades.  The history of the question of the relations of the Addison-Steele periodical, and especially of the “Coverley Papers,” to the novel is both instructive and amusing to those who have come to appreciate the humours of literary things.  It would probably have shocked the more orthodox admirers of the Spectator, during the eighteenth century, to have any such connection or relation so much as hinted.  But when people began to consider literature and literary history in a better arranged perspective, the fact that there is such a connection or relation must have been soon perceived.  It has become comparatively a commonplace:  and now the third stage ­that in which people become uneasy and suspicious of the commonplace and obvious and 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 the term.  There is no plot; some of what should be the most important characters are merely heard of, not seen; and the various scenes have no sort of connection, except that the same persons figure in them.  But these undeniable facts do not interfere with two other facts, equally undeniable and much more important.  The first is that the papers could be turned into a novel with hardly any important alteration, and with only quantum suff. of addition and completion.  “The widow” is there in the background ready to be produced and made a heroine; many of the incidents are told novel-fashion already, and more could be translated into that fashion by the veriest tyro at novel writing who has written at any time during the last one hundred and fifty years.  The personages of the club have merely to step down and out; the scenes to be connected, amplified, and multiplied; the conversation to undergo the same process.

But the second point is of greater importance still.  Not only could the “Coverley Papers,” be made into a novel without the slightest difficulty, and by a process much of which would be simple enlargement of material; but they already possess, in a fashion which requires no alteration at all, many of the features of the novel, far more successfully 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 description even more:  but it is truest of all of the characters.  Except Bunyan, nobody in prose fiction had ever made personages so thoroughly spirited as Sir Roger and even the two Wills, Honeycomb and Wimble; while here there was “no allaying Thames” in the shape of allegory, little moralising and that of a kind quite human, a plentiful setting of ordinary and familiar scene, and a more plentiful and exact adjustment of ordinary and familiar manners.  It is true that Addison, partly owing to the undercurrent of his satirical humour (Steele succeeds rather better here), has not attained the astonishing verisimilitude of the writer to whom we shall come next and last but one in this chapter.  His characters are perfectly natural, but we know, all the while, that they are works of art.  But in most of the points just mentioned he has exactly the tricks of the novelist’s art that Defoe has not.  The smaller tales in the Tatler and its followers undoubtedly did something to remove the reproach from prose fiction, and more to sharpen the appetite for it.  But they were nothing new:  the short tale being of unknown antiquity.  The “Coverley Papers” were new and did much more.  This new kind of treatment may not have suggested beforehand (it is not certain that it did not) the extensive novel of character and manners ­the play lengthened, bodied more strongly, and turned into narrative form.  But the process was there; the instances of it were highly reputed and widely known.  It must in almost any case have gone hard but a further step still would be taken.  It was actually taken by the person who had suggested the periodical essay itself.

Much has been written about Defoe, but, curiously enough, the least part of what has been written about him has concerned the very part of him that is read ­his novels.  Nay, occasional eccentrics, and not only these, have shown a sort of disposition to belittle him as a novelist:  indeed the stock description of Richardson as the Father of the English Novel almost pointedly rules Defoe out.  Yet further, the most adequate and intelligent appreciation of his novel work itself has too often been mainly confined to what is no doubt a subject of exceeding interest ­the special means by which he secures the attention, and procures the delight, of his readers.  We shall have to deal with this too.  But the point 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 by which, after thirty or forty years of restless publication in all sorts of prose and rhyme, Defoe niched himself immovably in English literature, was a new departure by almost an old man.  He was all but, if not quite, sixty when Robinson Crusoe appeared:  and a very few following years saw the appearance of his pretty voluminous “minor” novels.  The subject of the first every one knows without limitation:  it is not so certain, though vigorous efforts have been made to popularise the others, that even their subjects are clearly known to many people. Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders, and Colonel Jack (both 1722) 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), the least interesting, but not uninteresting, is exactly what its title imports, ­in other words, the “stuffing” of the Robinson pie without the game.  The Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720) approach the historical novel (or at least the similar “stuffing” of that) and have raised curious and probably insoluble questions as to whether they are inventions at all ­questions intimately connected with that general one referred to above.  One or two minor things are sometimes added to the list:  but they require no special notice.  The seven books just mentioned are Defoe’s contribution to the English novel.  Let us consider the quality of this contribution first ­and then the means used to attain it.

Their novel-quality (which, as has been hinted, has not been claimed so loudly or so steadily as it should have been for Defoe) is the quality of Story-Interest ­and this, one dares say, he not only infused for the first time in full dose, but practically introduced into the English novel, putting the best of the old mediaeval romances aside and also putting aside The Pilgrim’s Progress, which is not likely to have been without influence on himself.  It may be said, “Oh! but the Amadis romances, and the Elizabethan novels, and the ‘heroics’ must have interested or they would not have been read.”  This looks plausible, but is a mistake.  Few people who have not studied the history of criticism know the respectable reluctance to be pleased with literature which distinguished mankind till very recent times; and which in fact kept the novel back or was itself maintained by the absence of the novel.  In life people pleased themselves irregularly enough:  in literature they could not get out of the idea that they ought to be instructed, that it was enough to be instructed, and that it was discreditable to ask for more.  Even the poet was allowed to delight grudgingly and at his peril; was suspected because he did delight, and had to pay a sort of heavy licence-duty for it, in the shape of concomitant instruction to others and good behaviour in himself.  In fact he was a publican who was bound to serve stodgy food as well as exhilarating drink.

It is impossible to doubt that people were similarly affected to the fiction of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, at least in its longer examples ­for the smaller novelle could amuse in their own way sometimes, though they could hardly absorb.  It is equally impossible to imagine any one being “enthralled” by Euphues.  Admiration, of a kind, must have been the only passion excited by it.  In the Arcadia there is a certain charm, but it belongs to the inset verse ­to the almost Spenserian visionariness of parts ­to the gracious lulling atmosphere of the whole.  If it had been published in three volumes, one cannot imagine the most enthusiastic novel-reader knocking up a friend late at night for volume two or volume three.  I have said that I can read Parismus for pastime:  but the pastime that it provides is certainly not over-stimulating, and the mild stimulant becomes unsweetened and unlemoned barley-water in books of the Parthenissa class.  If with them conversing one forgets all time, it must be by the influence of the kind go-between Sleep.  We know, of course, that their contemporaries did not go to sleep over them:  but it was because they felt that they were being done good to ­that they were in the height of polite society ­that their manners were being softened and not allowed to be gross.  The time, in its blunt way, was fond of contrasting the attractions of a mistress on one side and “a friend and a bottle” on the other.  That a novel could enter into competition with either or both, as an interesting and even exciting means of passing the time, would have entered very few heads at all and have been contemptuously dismissed from most of those that it did enter.

Addison and Steele in the “Coverley Papers” had shown the way to construct this new spell:  Defoe actually constructed it.  It may be that some may question whether the word “exciting” applies exactly to his stories.  But this is logomachy:  and in fact a well-willing reader can get very fairly excited while the Cavalier is escaping after Marston Moor; while it is doubtful whether the savages have really come and what will be the event; while it is again doubtful whether Moll is caught or not; or what has become of those gains of the boy Jack, which can hardly be called ill-gotten because there is such a perfect unconsciousness of ill on the part of the getter.  At any rate, if such a reader cannot feel excitement 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 one or two other books (especially the already mentioned Isle of Pines) may not unfitly employ the literary historian who chooses to occupy himself with them.  The allegory which Defoe alleges in it, and which some biographers have endeavoured to work out, cannot, I suppose, be absolutely pooh-poohed, but presents no attractions whatever to the present writer.  Whether the Cavalier is pure fiction, or partly embroidered fact, is a somewhat interesting question, if only because it seems to be impossible to find out the answer:  and the same may be said of the not impossible (indeed almost more than probable) Portuguese maps and documents at the back of Captain Singleton.  To disembroil the chronological muddle of Roxana, and follow out the tangles of the hide-and-seek of that most unpleasant “lady of pleasure” and her daughter, may suit some.  But, apart from all these things, there abides the fact that you can read the books ­read them again and again ­enjoy them most keenly at first and hardly less keenly afterwards, however often you repeat the reading.

As has been partly said, the means by which this effect is achieved, and also the means by which it is not, are almost equally remarkable.  The Four Elements of the novel are sometimes, and not incorrectly, said to be Plot, Character, Description, and Dialogue ­Style, which some would make a fifth, being rather a characteristic in another order of division.  It is curious that Defoe is rebellious or evasive under any analysis of this kind.  His plots are of the “strong” order ­the events succeed each other and are fairly connected, but do not compose a history so much as a chronicle.  In character, despite his intense verisimilitude, he is not very individual.  Robinson himself, Moll, Jack, William the Quaker in Singleton, even Roxana the cold-blooded and covetous courtesan, cannot be said not to be real ­they and almost every one of the minorities are an immense advance on the colourless and bloodless ticketed puppets of the Middle Fiction.  But they still want something ­the snap of the fingers of the artist.  Moll is perhaps the most real of all of them and yet one has no flash-sights of her being ­never sees her standing out against soft blue sky or thunder-cloud as one sees the great characters of fiction; never hears her steps winding and recognises her gesture as one does theirs.

So again his description is sufficient:  and the enumerative particularity 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 way and has hardly the least decoration or poetical quality.  Well as we know Crusoe’s Island the actual scenery of it is not half so much impressed as that even, for instance, of Masterman Ready’s ­it is either of the human figures ­Crusoe’s own grotesque bedizenment, the savages, Friday, the Spaniards, Will Atkins ­or of the works of man ­the stockade, the boat, and the rest ­that we think.  A little play is made with Jack’s glass-house squalor and Roxana’s magnificence de mauvais lieu, but not much:  the gold-dust and deserts of Singleton are a necessary part of the “business,” but nothing more. Moll Flanders ­in some respects the greatest of all his books ­has the bareness of an Elizabethan stage in scenery and properties ­it is much if Greenfield spares us a table or a bed to furnish it.

Of Dialogue Defoe is specially fond ­even making his personages soliloquise in this after a fashion ­and it plays a very important part in “the secret:”  yet it can hardly be classed very high as dialogue.  And this is at least partly due to the strange drab shapelessness of his style, which never takes on any brilliant colour, or quaint individual form.

Yet it is very questionable whether any other style would have suited the method so well, or would even have suited it at all.  For this method ­to leave off hinting at it and playing round it ­is one of almost endless accumulation of individually trivial incident, detail, and sometimes observation, the combined effect of which is to produce an insensible but undoubting acceptance, on the reader’s part, of the facts presented to him.  The process has been more than once analysed in that curious and convenient miniature example of it, the “Mrs. Veal” supercherie:  but you may open the novels proper almost anywhere and discover it in full operation.  Like most great processes of art, this is an adoption and perfecting of habits usual with the most inartistic people ­a turning to good account of the interminably circumstantial superfluities of the common gossip and newsmonger.  Very often Defoe actually does not go beyond this ­just as in The Shortest Way with the Dissenters he had simply reproduced the actual thoughts and wishes of those who disliked dissent.  But sometimes he got the better of this also, as in the elaborate building up of Robinson’s surroundings and not a little in the other books.  And there the effect is not only verisimilar but wonderful in its verisimilitude.  At any rate, in him, and for English prose and secular fiction, we have first that mysterious charm of the real that is not real ­of the “human creation” ­which constitutes the appeal of the novel.  In some of the books there is hardly any appeal of any other sort.  Moll Flanders, though not unkindly, and “improper” rather from the force of circumstances than from any specially vicious inclination, is certainly not a person for whom one has much liking.  Colonel Jack, after his youthful experiences in pocket-picking, is rather a nonentity, something of a coward, a fellow of no particular wits, parts, or definite qualities of any kind.  Singleton is 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 there are few more repulsive heroines in fiction ­while the Cavalier and the chief figure in the Voyage Round the World are simply threads on which their respective adventures are strung.  Even Robinson himself enlists no particular sympathy except of the “put-yourself-in-his-place” kind.  Yet these sorry or negative personages, of whom, in the actual creation of God, we should be content to know nothing except from paragraphs in the newspaper (and generally in the police-reports thereof), content us perfectly well with their company through hundreds and thousands of solid pages, and leave us perfectly ready to enjoy it again after a reasonable interval.

This, as has been said, is the mystery of fiction ­a mystery partly set a-working in the mediaeval romance, then mostly lost, and now recovered ­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 again rediscovered by the great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century ­to slip in and out of hands during the later part of that century, and then to be all but finally established, in patterns for everlasting pursuance, by Miss Austen and by Scott.  But Defoe is really (unless we put Bunyan before him) the first of the magicians ­not the greatest by any means, but great and almost alone in the peculiar talent of making uninteresting things interesting ­not by burlesquing them or satirising them; not by suffusing or inflaming them with passion; not by giving them the amber of style; but by serving them “simple of themselves” as though they actually existed.

The position of Defoe in novel history is so great that there is a temptation to end this chapter with him.  But to do so would cause an inconvenience greater than any resulting advantages.  For the greatest of Defoe’s contemporaries in English letters also comes into our division, and comes best here.  One cannot conveniently rank Swift with the great quartette of the next chapter, because he is a novelist “by interim” and incompletely:  to rank him among the minor and later novelists of the eighteenth century would be as to the first part of the classification absurd 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.  It has even been thought (plausibly enough, though the matter is of no great importance) that the form of Gulliver may have been to some extent determined by Robinson Crusoe and Defoe’s other novels of travel.  And there is a subtler reason for taking the pair together and both close to Addison and Steele.

Swift had shown the general set towards prose fiction, and his own bent in the same direction, long before Defoe’s novel-period and as early as the Tale of a Tub and the Battle of the Books (published 1704 but certainly earlier in part).  The easy flow of the narrative, and the vivid dialogue of the Spider and the Bee in the latter, rank high among those premonitions of novel with which, in this place, we should be specially busied.  In the former Peter, Martin, and Jack want but a little more of the alchemist’s furnace to accomplish their projection into real characters, and not merely allegorical figure-heads.  But, of course, in both books, the satiric purpose dominates too much to allow them to be really ranked among novels, even if they had taken the trouble 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) that natural and unsophisticated children always do, and that almost anybody who has a certain power of turning blind eyes when and where he chooses can, read it simply as a story of adventure and enjoy it hugely.  It would be a most preternatural child or a most singularly constituted adult who could read Utopia or Oceana, or even Cyrano’s Voyages, “for the story” and enjoy them hugely.  This means that Swift had either learnt from Defoe or ­and considering those earlier productions of his own much more probably ­had independently developed the knack of absorbing the reader ­the knack of telling a story.  But of 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 independent of story, though (and this once more comes in for our present purpose) they are quite capable of adaptation to story-purposes, and have been so adapted ever since by the greatest masters of the art.  These are strokes of satire, turns of phrase, little illuminations of character, and seasonings 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 near perfection.

There is, however, another book of Swift’s which, though perhaps seldom mentioned or even thought of in connection with the novel, is of real importance in that connection, and comes specially in with our present main consideration ­the way in which the several parts of the completed novel were being, as it were, separately got ready and set apart for the use of the accomplished novelist.  This is the very curious and agreeable piece called Polite Conversation (1738), on which, though it was not printed till late in his life and close on Pamela itself, there is good reason for thinking that he had been for many years engaged.  The importance of dialogue in the novel has been often mentioned and will scarcely be contested:  while frequent occasion has been taken to point out that it had hitherto been very ill-achieved.  Swift’s “conversation” though designedly underlined, as it were, to show up current follies and extravagances of phrase and of fashion generally, is yet pretty certainly in the main the real average conversation of the society of his time, which he knew well and thoroughly.  Further, there is a distinct, though it may be almost impalpable, difference between it and the conversation of the stage, though it is naturally connected therewith.  Non-poetical stage dialogue in capable hands is either deliberate talking for display of “wit” like that of Congreve, or is conditioned and directed by the necessities of action and character.  Of course, novel conversation may diverge in the first direction, and cannot properly neglect the second altogether.  But, as there is room for very much more of it, it may and should allow itself a considerably wider range and imitate, on proper occasions, the desultory gossip and small talk of people who live on the “boards” of a room-floor and not of a stage.

This is just what Swift’s does, and just what there is very little of in Defoe; almost necessarily less in Addison and his group because of their essay form; and hardly anything elsewhere and earlier.  Just as the Coverley Papers could, by one process and no difficult one, have been thrown into a novel; so by another, a not much more difficult and a much less complicated one, could the Polite Conversation be thrown into part of a novel ­while in each case the incomplete and unintentional draft itself supplies patterns for the complete work in new kind such as had never been given before.  Indeed the Conversation may almost be said to be part of a novel ­and no small part ­as it stands, and of such a novel as had never been written before.

But there was something still further all but absolutely necessary to the novel, though not necessary to it alone, which Defoe, Addison, and Swift, each in his several way, worked mightily to supply:  and that was a flexible business-like “workaday” prose style.  Not merely so long as men aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of Euphues and the Arcadia, but so long as the old splendid and gorgeous, but cumbrous and complicated pre-Restoration style lasted, romances were possible, but novels were not.  You might indeed pick out of Shakespeare ­especially from such parts as those of Beatrice, Rosalind, and some of the fools ­a capital novel-style:  but then you can pick almost anything out of Shakespeare.  Elsewhere the constant presence either of semi-poetic phraseology or of some kind of “lingo” was almost fatal.  You want what Sprat calls a more “natural way of speaking” (though not necessarily a “naked” one) for novel purposes ­a certain absence of ceremony and parade of phrase:  though the presence of slang and some other things, the rebuking of 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 though inarticulately proclaimed, desire for novels; on the other, the accumulation, in haphazard and desultory way, of almost all the methods, the processes, the “plant,” necessary to turn novels out; but hardly anything except the considered work of Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift which really deserves the name of novel.  A similar process had been going on in France; and, in the different work of Le Sage and Marivaux, had actually produced work in the kind more advanced than anything in English.  But the tables were soon to be turned:  and during the rest of the century the English Novel was at last to assert itself as a distinct, an increasingly popular, and a widely cultivated kind.  That this was due to the work of the four great novelists who fill its central 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.