phleteering, eulogizing or abusing the views of different parties on political, religious and social questions, takes to writing novels he is not likely to keep those questions out of his books; in fact, he could not if he would. But it would be a very superficial view to regard Defoe's stories as in any sense novels of purpose. As to the moralizations, they are as a rule, except in Robinson Crusoe, something foreign and extraneous; we must blame the contemporary prejudice against any kind of literature that did not minister to moral improvement. They are, virtually, his apology for writing novels, and the excuse—often, perhaps, not entirely sincere—for the risky nature of his themes. To our eyes, they appear in their proper light as so entirely gratuitous, that the stories would be infinitely better without them. Defoe, in short, is the first Naturalist in modern fiction, and it is only by virtue of the general advance in craftsmenship, and the more precise knowledge and subtler insight placed in the hands of the student of life by modern science, that the Naturalists of recent days are his superiors. By right of his personal achievement, Defoe ranks among the greatest.
It is hardly possible to attach too much importance to the revolution he carried out in English fiction. By the coming of Defoe, the novel, which had hitherto been a hybrid and nondescript thing, a kind of by-product of poetry, was at last differentiated as an independent art-form. Our first prose tales were derived from the metrical romances, and were scarcely less poetical in matter, form and spirit than their originals. Even when writers forsook the traditional material, and began to invent, the novel did not succeed altogether in taking a separate place in the literary hierarchy; for a long time to come, its authors were unable to make up their minds as to whether they were writing poetry or prose, or rather, they conceived themselves to be poets working in a looser and more popular medium. Euphuism, which, as recent investigators have established, was a force in literature before Lyly wrote, and even before the writings of Guevara were read in this country, was a symptom of this hesitation. It represents an effort to retain in artistic prose some of the charms for ear and mind evoked by metrical diction. In its most elaborate form, imagery, assonance and alliteration, regulated by artificial laws of antithesis and recurrence, supplied an equivalent for the effects of verse. Sidney's Arcadia (included in this series, with an introduction in which this question is worked out further) was richer in imagery and more fanciful in style than the most flowery compositions of the medieval versifiers. But it is not merely a question of style. The world portrayed is hardly more a reflection of the real world than is the Faëry Land of Spenser; the shepherd poets and pastoral princesses are not characters drawn from life, but facets of their creator's high and chivalrous personality. The sentimental idylls of Lodge and Greene come a step or two, but no more, nearer
