not only to portray life but to exhibit this or that deduction about life.
In the eighteenth century this tendency took definite shape and substance, for then it became notably true that the division between narrative and essay was not coincident with a division between narrators and essayists. Swift, Addison, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, were both. And it was their mantle and not that of romance writers, Gothic or Historical, that best fitted Victorian shoulders. Of the many testimonies to this, direct and indirect, the following from a characteristic Victorian pen may be cited as evidence:[1]
"The reader of a novel—who had doubtless taken the volume
up simply for amusement, and who would probably lay it down
did he suspect that instruction, like a snake-in-the-grass, like
physic beneath the sugar, was to be imposed upon him—requires
from his author chiefly this, that he shall be amused by
a narrative in which elevated sentiment prevails, and gratified
by being made to feel that the elevated sentiments described are
exactly his own."
He then goes on to show that this morality is best served
by realism, in spite of the superior attractions of heroes
and villains:[2]
"But for one Harry Esmond, there are fifty Ralph Newtons—five
hundred and fifty of them; and the very youth whose
bosom glows with admiration as he reads of Harry—who exults
in the idea that as Harry did, so would he have done—lives as
Ralph lived, is less noble, less persistent, less of a man even
than was Ralph Newton.
"It is the test of a novel-writer's art that he conceals his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always
