The Rise of the English Novel
Wilbur L. Cross
The Elizabethans
… Elizabethan England inherited much that was best in
English mediæval fiction: the Arthurian romances, the moralized stories of
Gower, and the highly finished tales of Chaucer. From Italy came the pastoral
romance in its most dreamy and attenuated form, the gorgeous poetic romances of
Tasso and Ariosto, and many collections of novelle. Some of these novelle had
as subject the interesting events of everyday life; others were of fierce
incident and color, and furnished Elizabethan tragedy with tremendous scenes.
From Germany came jest-books and tales of necromancy; from France, the Greek
story of adventure with its shipwrecks and pirates; from Spain came 'Amadis,'
the 'Diana' of Montemayor, and the picaresque novel. And what the noble
printers of the Renaissance gave her, England worked over into fictions of her
own.
The most characteristic of her adaptations, the one that
most fully expressed her restless spirit of adventure and æsthetic restoration
of the age of chivalry, was a romance midway between the knightly quest and the
pastoral. Of this species, a conspicuous example is Sir Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia'
(1590). This romance has in places as background to its pretty wooing
adventures the loveliness of the summer scenery about Wilton House, where it
was planned,—violets and roses, meadows and wide-sweeping downs 'garnished with
stately trees,'—and into it was infused the noble courtesy, the high sense of
honor, and the delicate feeling of the first gentleman of the age. Though
touching at points the real in its reflection of English scenes and the
princely virtues of Sidney and his friends, the 'Arcadia' is mainly an ideal
creation. The country it describes is the land of dream and enchantment, of
brave exploit, unblemished chastity, constant love, and undying friendship.
Villany and profane passion darken these imaginary realms, but they, too, like
the virtues, are all ideal. In structure the 'Arcadia' is epic, having attached
to the main narrative numerous episodes, one of which—the story of Argalus and
Parthenia, faithful unto death—is among the most lovely situations romance has
ever conceived and elaborated.
In direct antithesis to its Arcadias, Elizabethan England
made hasty studies of robbers and highwaymen; out of which, under the artistic
impulse of 'Lazarillo de Tormes' (translated into English in 1576), were
developed several rogue stories of considerable pretension, such as 'Jack
Wilton,' by Thomas Nash, and 'Piers Plain,' by Henry Chettle. To the same class
of writings belong Greene's autobiographies, his 'Repentance,' and 'Groat's
Worth of Wit,' in which the point of view is shifted from the comic to the
tragic. Occasionally the Elizabethan romancers drew their subjects from the
bourgeoisie. An amusing instance of this is 'Thomas of Reading,' by Thomas
Deloney, which contains from the picaresque point of view a graphic picture of
the family life of the clothiers of the West, and of their mad pranks in
London. Its scene is laid in the time of Henry the First, and it thus becomes
historically interesting as one of the earliest attempts of the modern
story-teller to invade the province of history.
The most immediately popular Elizabethan fiction, whether
romantic or realistic, was John Lyly's 'Euphues' (1579-80). In this romance of
high life there are no enchantments and exciting incidents such as had
furnished the stock in trade of Montalvo and his followers. Lyly sought to
interest by his style: alliteration, play upon words, antithesis, and a revival
of the pseudo-natural history of mediæval fable books. His characters are
Elizabethan fops and fine ladies, who sit all night at Lady Flavia's supper-table,
discussing in pretty phrases such questions as, why women love men, whether
constancy or secrecy is most commendable in a mistress, whether love in the
first instance proceeds from the man or from the woman—a dainty warfare in
which are gained no victories. Lyly moralizes like a Gower on the profane
passion; he steps into the pulpit and preaches, telling mothers to suckle their
children, and husbands to treat their wives mildly, for 'instruments sound
sweetest when they be touched softest;' and for young men he constructs a moral
code in minute detail, such as Shakespeare parodies in Polonius' advice to
Laertes. Weak, puerile, and affected as he was, Lyly wrote with the best
intentions; he was a Puritan educated in the casuistry of Rome.
Lyly was the founder of a school of romancers, who, from
their following the affectations of 'Euphues,' are known as Euphuists. With
them all, language was first and matter secondary: 'A golden sentence is worth
a world of treasure' was one of their sayings. Of these Euphuists, Robert
Greene and Thomas Lodge excelled their master in the poetic qualities of their
work; witness 'Menaphon' (1589) by the former, and 'Rosalind' (1590) by the
latter. In fact 'Rosalind,' a pastoral composed in the ornate language of 'Euphues,'
is the flower of Elizabethan romance. It satisfies some of the usual terms in
the modern definition of the novel. For it is of reasonable length; it
possesses a kind of structure, and closes with an elaborate moral.
The Historical Allegory and the French Influence
From Elizabeth to the Restoration, romancing and
story-telling gradually became a lost art in England. An imitation of Sidney's
'Arcadia' now and then appeared, a sketch of a highwayman, and a few straggling
imitations of contemporary French romance. That was about all. There was for a
time a steady demand for Elizabethan favorites: 'Euphues,' 'Rosalind,' and
especially the 'Groat's Worth of Wit,' and the 'Arcadia.' With the excitement
that sounded the note of the oncoming civil war—the trial of Hampden and the
uprising of the Scots—the English suddenly stopped reading fiction as well as
writing it….
The Restoration
After the battle of Worcester, the English began once more
to read fiction. Lyly, Greene, and Sidney all survived the literary wreckage of
the civil wars. From now on the French romances were translated as fast as they
were published in France. And for reading them and discussing love, friendship,
and statecraft, little coteries were formed, the members of which addressed one
another as 'the matchless Orinda,' 'the adored Valeria,' and 'the noble
Antenor.' Best known in their own time were the groups of platonic lovers,
professing an immaculate chastity, who hovered about Katherine Philips and
Margaret Duchess of Newcastle. The literary efforts of these romantic ladies
and gentlemen were directed to poetry and letter-writing rather than to
fiction. There proceeded from them only one romance, 'Parthenissa' (1664, 1665,
1677), by Roger Boyle, an admirer of Katherine Philips. The most noticeable
thing about this inexpressibly dull imitation of Scudéri, is its mixing up in
much confusion several great Roman wars. For this, particularly for bringing on
the scene together Hannibal and Spartacus, Boyle defended himself in his
preface by an appeal to Vergil, who neglected two centuries in his story of
Æneas and Dido. For making the same character stand now for one person and now
for another in his historical allegory, he gracefully apologized, but he might
have cited Barclay as his precedent. Other similar romances were: 'Bentivolio
and Urania' (1660), by Nathaniel Ingelo; 'Aretina' (1661), by George Mackenzie;
and 'Pandion and Amphigenia' (1665), by John Crowne. The first is a religious
fiction; the second, made up of adventures, moral essays, and disquisitions on
English and Scotch politics, was an attempt to revive the conceits of Lyly; the
third is an appropriation of Sidney's 'Arcadia.' Like Crowne, the Restoration
romancers were generally satisfied to remodel and dress up old material. And
what is true of them, is also true of the realists. An odd and wretchedly
written production of this period is 'The English Rogue' (1665-71), by Richard
Head, and in part by Francis Kirkman. For tricks and intrigues they pillaged
Spanish and French rogue stories, Elizabethan sketches of vagabonds, and German
and English jest-books; and seasoned their medley with what probably then
passed for humor. On the other hand, they wrote much from observation. In their
graphic pictures of the haunts of apprentices, pickpockets, and highwaymen,
they discovered the London slums. Furthermore, unlike their brother picaresque
writers, they sent their hero on a voyage to the East, and thus began the
transformation of the rogue story into the story of adventure as it was soon to
appear in Defoe.
More original work than this was done by Mrs. Aphra Behn,
who wrote besides many comedies several short tales, the most noteworthy of
which is 'Oroonoko' (1688). In this story, which is a realistic account of a
royal slave kidnapped in Africa and barbarously put to death at Surinam, she
contrasts the state of nature with that of civilization, severely reprimanding
the latter. 'Oroonoko' is the first humanitarian novel in English. Though its
spirit cannot for a moment be compared, in moral earnestness, with 'Uncle Tom's
Cabin,' yet its purpose was to awaken Christendom to the horrors of slavery.
The time being not yet ripe for it, the romance was for the public merely an
interesting story to be dramatized. The novels of Mrs. Behn that bore fruit
were her short tales of intrigue—versions in part of her own tender
experiences. One of her successors was Mrs. Mary Manley, who wrote 'The Secret
History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians' (1705), 'The New Atlantis' (1709),
and 'The Power of Love, in Seven Novels' (1720). Mrs. Manley was in turn
followed by Mrs. Eliza Haywood, the author of 'Memoirs of a Certain Island
Adjacent to Utopia' (1725), and 'The Secret Intrigues of the Count of
Caramania' (1727). These productions taken together purport to relate the
inside history of the court from the restoration of Charles the Second to the
death of George the First. To their contemporaries, they were piquantly
immoral; to later times, they are not so amusing. Nevertheless, in the
development of the novel, they have a place. They represent a conscious effort
to attain to the real, in reaction from French romance. They are specimens,
too, of precisely what was meant in England by the novel in distinction from
the romance, just before Richardson: a short story of from one hundred to two
hundred pages, assumed to be founded on fact, and published in a duodecimo
volume.
To John Bunyan the English novel owes a very great debt.
What fiction needed, if it was ever to come near a portrayal of real life, was
first of all to rid itself of the extravagances of the romancer and the
cynicism of the picaresque story-teller. Though Bunyan was despised by his
contemporary men of letters, it surely could be but a little time before the
precision of his imagination and the force and charm of his simple and
idiomatic English would be felt and then imitated. As no writer preceding him,
Bunyan knew the artistic effect of minute detail in giving reasonableness to an
impossible story. In the 'Pilgrim's Progress' (1678-84) he so mingled with
those imaginative scenes of his own the familiar Scripture imagery and the
still more familiar incidents of English village life, that the illusion of
reality must have been to the readers for whom he wrote well-nigh perfect. The
allegories of Barclay and Scudéri could not be understood without keys;
Bunyan's 'Palace Beautiful' needed none.
Literary Forms that contributed to the Novel
Outside the sphere proper of fiction, there was slowly
collecting in the seventeenth century material for the future novelist. It was
quite the fashion for public and literary men—witness Pepys and Evelyn—to keep
diaries and journals of family occurrences and of interesting social and
political events. These diaries and journals suggested the novel of family life,
and indicated a form of narrative that would lend to fiction the appearance of
fact. In 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'Pamela' and hundreds of other novels down to
the present, the journal has played a not inconsiderable part. At this time,
too, men were becoming sufficiently interested in their friends and some of the
great men of the past to write their biographies. In 1640 Izaak Walton
published the first of his charming 'Lives.' A quick offshoot of the biography
was the autobiography, which, as a man in giving a sympathetic account of
himself is likely to run into poetry, came very close to being a novel.
Margaret Duchess of Newcastle's 'Autobiography,' published in 1656 in a volume
of tales, is a famous account of a family in which 'all the brothers were brave,
and all the sisters virtuous.' Bunyan's 'Grace Abounding' is a story of the
fierce struggles between the spirit and the flesh, and of the final triumph of
the spirit. This autobiographic method of dealing with events, partly or wholly
fictitious, has been a favorite with all our novelists, except with the very
greatest; and it is employed more to-day than ever before.
It also occurred to several writers after the Restoration
that London life might be depicted by a series of imaginary letters to a
friend. A most amusing bundle of two hundred and eleven such letters was
published in 1664 by Margaret Duchess of Newcastle. Her object was to transfer
to letters, scenes and incidents that had hitherto been the material of the
comedy of humor. In 1678 a new direction to this letter-writing was given by a
translation from the French of the 'Portuguese Letters.' These letters of a
Portuguese nun to a French cavalier revealed to our writers how a
correspondence might be managed for unfolding a simple story, and for studying
the heart of a betrayed and deserted woman. Edition after edition of the
'Portuguese Letters' followed, and fictitious replies and counter-replies. In
the wake of these continuations, were translated into English the letters of
Eloisa and Abelard, containing a similar but more pathetic tale of man's
selfishness and woman's devotion. They, too, went through many editions and
were imitated, mutilated, and trivialized. As a result of this fashion for
letter-writing, there existed early in the eighteenth century a considerable
body of short stories in letter form. Hardly any of them are readable; but one
of them is of considerable historical interest, 'The Letters of Lindamira, a
Lady of Quality, written to her Friend in the Country' (second edition, 1713).
The author, who may have been Tom Brown 'of facetious memory,' states that,
unlike his predecessors, his aim is 'to expose vice, disappoint vanity, to
reward virtue, and crown constancy with success.' He accomplishes this 'by
carrying Lindamira through a sea of misfortunes, and at last marrying her up to
her wishes.' It was in this weak school of fiction, aiming at something it
hardly knew what, that Richardson must in some degree have learned how to
manage a correspondence.
Moreover, the character-sketch, which was the most prolific
literary form in England and France during the seventeenth century, has a
direct bearing on the novel. As conceived by Ben Jonson and Thomas Overbury,
who had before them a contemporary translation of Theophrastus, it was the
sketch of some person, real or imaginary, who embodied a virtue or a vice, or
some idiosyncrasy obnoxious to ridicule. One character was set over against
another; and the sentences descriptive of each were placed in the antithesis
which the style of Lyly had made fashionable. Surely from this species of
literature, the novelist took a lesson in the fine art of contrast. The type of
sketch set by Jonson and Overbury was a good deal modified by the fifty and
more character-writers who succeeded them. Not infrequently as a frame to the
portrait was added a little piece of biography or adventure; and there are a
few examples of massing sketches in a loose fiction, as in the continuations of
'The English Rogue,' and in the second part of the 'Roman Bourgeois.' The
treatment of the character-sketch by Steele and Addison in the 'Spectator'
(1711-12) was highly original. They drew portraits of representative
Englishmen, and brought them together in conversation in a London club. They
conducted Sir Roger de Coverley through Westminster Abbey, to the playhouse, to
Vauxhall, into the country to Coverley church and the assizes; they
incidentally took a retrospective view of his life, and finally told the story
of his death. When they had done this, they had not only created one of the
best defined characters in our prose literature, but they had almost
transformed the character-sketch into a novel of London and provincial life.
From the 'Spectator' the character-sketch, with its types and minute
observation and urbane ridicule, passed into the novel, and became a part of
it.
The Passing of the Old Romance
At the dawn of the Renaissance, verse was usually an
embellishment of fiction, and the perfect workman was Chaucer, whose 'Troilus
and Cressida' and 'Canterbury Tales' are differentiated from the modern novel
mainly by the accident of rhyme. Of the later romances in prose, the two that
have gained among all classes a world-wide fame are 'Don Quixote' and the
'Pilgrim's Progress'; and second to them is the 'Princess of Clèves.' Nearly
everything else that has been mentioned is to the modern as if it had never
been written. That such a fate should have overcome the old romances must be
lamented by every one acquainted with their lovely imagery and inspiring ideals
of conduct. But it was inevitable, for they almost invariably failed in their
art. The great novelists since Fielding have taught the public that a novel
must have a beginning and an end. A reader of contemporary fiction, after
turning a few pages of Sidney's 'Arcadia,' becomes aware that he is not at the
beginning of the story at all, but is having described to him an event midway
in the plot. From this point on, the narrative, instead of moving forward
untrammelled, except for the pause of an easy retrospect, becomes more and more
perplexed by episodes, which are introduced, suspended, resumed, and twisted
within one another, according to a plan not easily understood. The picaresque
writers, the first of them, adopted the straightforward manner of
autobiography; but under the influence of romance, they, too, soon began to
indulge in episodes. If at their best the picaresque stories had a beginning,
they had no end. They were published in parts; each part was brought to a close
with the recurring paragraph that a continuation will be written if the reader
desires; and so adventure follows adventure, to be terminated only by the death
of the author. It is thus obvious that the romancers and story-tellers had no
clearly defined conception of what a novel should be as an independent literary
species. They took as their model the epic, not the well-ordered epic of Homer
or Vergil, but the prose epic as perverted by the rhetoricians in the decadent
period of Greek art.1
Moreover, it has come to be demanded not only that a novel
must possess an orderly structure, but that it shall be a careful study of some
phase of real life, or of conduct in a situation which, however impossible in
itself, the imagination is willing to accept for the time being as possible.
Accordingly, those who wish to shun the word 'romance' are accustomed to speak
of the novel of character and the novel of incident. In the novel of character
the interest is directed to the portrayal of men and women, and the fable is a
subordinate consideration; in the novel of incident the interest is directed to
what happens, and the characters come more by the way. To the former class no
one would hesitate to assign 'The Mill on the Floss.' To the same class might very
properly be assigned 'The House of the Seven Gables,' which, though Hawthorne
called it a romance, is, as he intended it, 'true to the human heart.' To the
latter class belong the Waverley novels, and to mention an extreme example,
'The Prisoner of Zenda.' Before Defoe, writers of fiction did in some degree
fulfil the conditions necessary to a novel in the modern view; but to concoct
fantastic adventures in high or low life, in accord neither with the truth of
fact, nor with the laws of a sane imagination, nor with the permanent motives
that sway our acts—that was the main business of the romancer and the
story-teller. From them to Defoe and Richardson the transition is analogous to
that from the first Elizabethan plays to Shakespeare and his contemporaries; it
is the passing from a struggling and misdirected literary form to a
well-defined species. Nevertheless, a study of European fiction before Defoe
has intellectual, if not æsthetic, compensations, and to the student it is
imperative. It gives one a large historical perspective. From Arthurian romance
and the fabliau downward, in the eternal swing between idealism and realism,
there is a continuous growth—an accumulation of incidents, situations,
characters, and experiments in structure, much of which was a legacy to the
eighteenth century.
Daniel Defoe
'Robinson Crusoe' (1719) is the earliest English novel of
incident. It was at once recognized in England and throughout literary Europe
as something different from the picaresque story to which it is akin. In what
does this difference consist? The situations and jests of Head and Chettle were
in some cases as old as Latin comedy; 'Robinson Crusoe' was an elaboration of a
contemporary incident2 that made a fascinating appeal to the imagination. The
writer of the rogue story did not expect to be believed. The aim of Defoe was
to invest his narrative with a sense of reality; to this end he made use of
every device at his command to deceive the reader. He took as a model for his
narrative the form that best produces the illusion of truth—that of current
memoirs with the accompaniment of a diary. He adroitly remarks in his preface
that he is only the editor of a private man's adventures, and adds
confidentially that he believes 'the thing to be a just history of fact,' at
least, that 'there is no appearance of fiction in it.' He begins his story very
modestly by briefly sketching the boyhood of a rogue who runs away to sea—one
of thousands—and thus gradually prepares the reader for those experiences which
are to culminate in the shipwreck on the Island of Despair. When he gets his
Crusoe there, he does not send him on a quest for exciting adventures, but
surprises us by a matter-of-fact account of Crusoe's expedients for feeding and
clothing himself and making himself comfortable. He brings the story home to
the Englishmen of the middle-class, for whom he principally writes, by telling
them that their condition in life is most conducive to happiness, and by giving
expression to their peculiar tenets: their trust in dreams, their recognition
of Providence in the fortuitous concurrence of events, and their dogmas of
conviction of sin, of repentance, and of conversion. And finally, 'Robinson
Crusoe' has its message. Undoubtedly its message is too apparent for the highest
art, but it is a worthy one: Be patient, be industrious, be honest, and you
will at last be rewarded for your labor. 'Robinson Crusoe' must have seemed to
the thousands of hard-laboring Englishmen a symbol of their own lives, their
struggles, their failures, and their final rest in a faith that there will
sometime be a settling of things justly in the presence of Him 'who will allow
no shuffling.' To put it briefly, Defoe humanized adventure.
'Robinson Crusoe' was the most immediately popular fiction
that had yet been written. At once it became a part of the world's literature,
and it remains such to this day. Defoe took advantage of its vogue to write
many other adventures on land and sea. Captain Singleton's tour across Africa
is as good reading as Stanley; and to the uninitiated, it seems quite as true
to fact. In 'Moll Flanders' is gathered together a mass of material concerning
the dregs of London—thieves and courtesans—that remains unequalled even among
the modern naturalists. The 'Memoirs of a Cavalier,' once regarded as an actual
autobiography, so realistic is the treatment, is the relation of the adventures
of a cavalier in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, and later at Marston Moor and
Naseby. It is a masterly piece of historical semblance, and it is thus
significant. The 'Journal of the Plague Year' is so documentary in appearance
that public libraries still class it as a history, though it is fictitious
throughout. This verisimilitude which was attained through detail and the
unadorned language of everyday life is Defoe's great distinction. Bunyan was in
a measure his forerunner, and his immediate successor was Swift, who, under the
guise of his delightful voyages among the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians
(1726), ridiculed in savage irony his king, 'his own dear country,' and 'the
animal called man.' These three writers who usher in a new era for the novel
are the source to which romance has returned again and again for instruction,
from Scott to Stevenson
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