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 _agrémens_ 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 Æneas

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 mediæval

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.[1] 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.

[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 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 _facetiæ_, 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 "disjectæ

membra _novellæ_" 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'Urfé first, and the Calprenède-Scudéry

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[2] 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.

[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 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 Scudéry 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.[3] 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.

[3] "Quant à moi, je trouve les choses que ces messieurs se

disent fort bien dites et tout à fait dignes de deux

gentilhommes."

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 mediæval 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 Scudéry 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 mediæval 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 Astræa." 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:[4] 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.

[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 French

picaresque novel had never been high: but it is curiously degraded in

this English example. Furetière 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.[5] 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.

[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 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 Interpreter'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 Scudéry 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 _un_interesting, 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 mediæval 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 mediæval 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.