the reign of the heroic romances in France, their vogue violently
affected the English book-market. The huge stories of Calprenède
and Gomberville were imported, and translated and imitated
to the exclusion of every other species of prose fiction, between
1645 and 1670. The long-winded books of Mdlle de Scudéry,
especially Cassandra and The Great Cyrus, were read so universally
in England as to leave their stamp on the national manners.
Of original English romances, written in competition with the
French masterpieces of tenderness and chivalry, the Parthenissa
of Lord Orrery (1654) is the best known. The first definite
stand against these Gallicized romances was made by two
dramatists, Aphara Behn and William Congreve. Congreve’s
Incognita (1692) is remarkable for its light raillery and humour,
and perhaps deserves as well as any 17th-century composition to
be called the earliest novel in English. The stories of Mrs Behn
have the merit of a romantic simplicity of narrative, but they
are dull and devoid of art. But the novel still lingered, unwilling
to make its appearance in England, and its place was taken during
the age of Anne by the labours of the essayists. So rich is the
character painting, so lively the touches of social colour in the
Spectator and Tatler, that these periodicals have, by enthusiastic
critics, been styled brilliant examples of prose fiction. But it
is obvious that in the delightful essays of Addison and Steele
there was no attempt made at construction, that the sustained
evolution of characters was not essayed, and that even in the
studies of Mr Bickerstaff’s Club anything like a plot was studiously
avoided. Yet these are all essential characteristics of the novel,
and until they make their appearance in English literature we
must not say that the secret has been discovered. Very near to
the mystery, if he did not quite grasp it, was Daniel Defoe, who
introduced into his narrative a minute and rude system of
realistic observation, by way of giving an impression of truth
to it. This exactitude he combined with a survival of the old
picaresque method, the result being those strange and entertaining
works Colonel Jack (1722) and Roxana (1724). Still closer
he came to positive success in the immortal narrative of Robinson
Crusoe, in which the fascination of the desolate island was first
worked up in English.
6. Not even yet had the English novel been invented. It came into the world in 1740 from the unconscious hands of Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), who had hit upon the notion that morality might be helped and young persons of inexperience protected by the preparation of a set of letters exchanged between imaginary persons. The result was Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded, a book which is in every strict sense the earliest English novel. It has even a claim to be considered the earliest European novel of the modern kind, for the assumption of French criticism that Richardson borrowed his ideas and his characters from the Marianne of Marivaux is not supported by evidence. There is no reason to suppose that Richardson met with the name of Marivaux earlier than 1749. At all events, it would seem to be certain that, whether in France or England, the fourth decade of the 18th century saw the spontaneous conception of this “new species of writing.” The name of the heroine of Richardson’s book was Miss Pamela Andrews, and the second English novel was Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), which started as a mere burlesque of Pamela, but proceeded upon admirably original lines of its own, in a study of the humours and manners of contemporary country life. Fielding rejected the epistolary artifice of Richardson, and told his story in a straightforward narrative, broken indeed by arguments and ejaculations which bound the new novel to the old essay of the Spectator type. The creative force of Fielding filled the pages of this book with a crowd of vividly-presented characters, and this marked a step in advance, for Richardson’s practice was to concentrate minute attention upon only one or two figures. It was from Richardson that the next important fiction came, in the shape of the long-drawn tragedy of Clarissa (1748). But a third great novelist was now at work; in 1748 appeared the Roderick Random of Smollett, and here we have neither the sculptural manner of Richardson nor the busy world of Fielding’s realism, but a comic impression founded on an artful employment of emphasis and exaggeration. Smollett gives us neither breathing statues nor a crowd of men and women, but a gallery of “freaks,” arranged with great art, indeed, but exhibited in such a way as to expose not their likeness but their unlikeness to the common stock of humanity. It is very important to note this curious divergency between the three great writers, because they exemplified the three classes into which almost all subsequent novels can with more or less ease be divided. The next move was made by Fielding, who in 1749 published his Tom Jones. Starting with the pungent horror of hypocrisy ever before him, Fielding constructs a fragment of the world in which men and women are seen, without exaggeration, plying their daily trades under the eye of an impartial observer who can penetrate to their secret motives. This was a great advance, and a still greater one was the sustained skill with which the author conducted the plot, the interwoven series of the actions of his characters. It may almost be said that until the publication of Tom Jones no novel with a real plot had been conceived in English. The rivalry of the great novelists of this time was of signal help to them, and there can be no question that the astounding richness of Tom Jones stirred Smollett to the exercise of increased energy in Peregrine Pickle (1751), a coarse and savage book, illuminated by brilliant flashes of humour. A better, because a tenderer and truer study of life was Amelia, which Fielding published in the same year; yet most readers have found this novel a little languid after Tom Jones. But if the ideal of life depicted in it was quieter and sadder, it was perhaps for that very reason more in harmony with the facts of life. Now Richardson, who had long been silent, reasserted his mastery of epistolary analysis in the huge History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), in which, as its admirers claimed, “all the recesses of the human heart are explored and its whole texture unfolded.” Richardson had scarcely been affected by the experiments of his contemporaries, of the very nature of which he affected to be ignorant, and the result is that in his third and last novel he depends entirely on qualities which he had already developed, and owes nothing to the discoveries of others.
7. With this book, the first great group of English novels comes to a close, and we may observe that in these eight stories everything is to be found, in germ if not in full evolution, which was during the next century and a half to make the abundant out-put of the English novel prominent. New forms, above all new subjects, were to present themselves to the imagination of capable British novelists, but the starting-point of every experiment was to be discovered in the ripest work of Richardson, Fielding and Smollett. Their influence was manifest in the writings of the second school of English novelists, in whom, however, several interesting varieties of subject and treatment were discovered. The Tristram Shandy (1759–1766) of Sterne, is the most masterly example in English of a humour which goes direct to pathos for its most “sentimental” effects, and of the kind of loosely-strung, reflective fiction which is hardly a narrative at all. Neither Tristram Shandy nor A Sentimental Journey (1768) can properly be included among novels. In Rasselas (1759) Dr Johnson showed that the new kind of writing could be used to give entertainment to a sermon and in this he was to have a multitude of followers. In Chrysal (1760) Charles Johnstone (d. 1800) showed that the picaresque romance could still exist, tinctured by the newly-found art of the novelist. In The Castle of Otranto (1764) Horace Walpole adapted the methods of the novelist to a pseudo-historical theme of horror and romance, and prophesied of Walter Scott. In The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) Goldsmith was indebted to most of his immediate predecessors, but fused their qualities in an amalgam of gentle wit and delicate sweetness and conversational brevity which has made his one loosely-constructed novel a foremost classic of our literature. Thus, in the one quarter of a century which divides Pamela from The Vicar of Wakefield, English novel-writing was born, grew into full maturity, and adopted its adult and final forms.
8. During the remainder of the 18th century, little or nothing was done to extend the range of prose fiction in England, but one or two of those departments of novel-writing which had already
