Chapter VIII: The Fiction of Yesterday--Conclusion (2)

But at the same time the limitations, outside the greatest, are certainly peculiar. It seems wonderful that a man like Cumberland, for instance, who had not a little literary talent, should not have been able to make _Henry_ into a story of real interest that might hold the reader as even second-class Trollope--say a book like _Orley Farm_--does. We have ungraciously recognised that some of our lady novelists, who wrote by forties and by fifties, did not always sustain the interest of their novels. Miss Burney wrote four in all, and could hardly keep up the interest of hers right through the second. Above all, there is the difficulty of their failure with conversation and, in fact, with any diction proper for conversation. If Horace Walpole, a contemporary of the eighteenth-century novel from its actual start to practically its finish, could give us thousands and all but tens of thousands of phrases that want but a little of being novel-conversation ready made, why could not the other people make it for their own purposes? But we have got no answer to these questions: and probably there is none.

The way in which Scott and Miss Austen themselves simultaneously found out the secrets of the two kinds of novel is no doubt, as such ways always are, in the larger part mysterious: but to a certain extent it can be explained and analysed, independently of the direct literary genius of each. One of the greatest gifts of Scott--one with which the non-historical novelist can dispense as little as his brother the historical--was that "genius of history" with which Lord Morley--a critic not likely to be misled by sympathy in some respects at any rate--has justly credited him. For unless you have this "historic sense," as it has been more generally and perhaps better termed (though to the intense disgust of some professed historians), it is not only impossible for you to delineate scene and character at a distance from your time, but you become really disqualified for depicting your own time itself. You fail to distinguish the temporary from the permanent; you achieve perhaps a fairly faithful copy of actual manners and fashions, but you do nothing more, and as the subject dies so does the picture. Contrast Hook, say, with Thackeray, and the difference will emerge at once.

Secondly, Scott had, besides this historic sense and the relish for humanity which must accompany it, a knowledge of literature with which he has been too seldom credited to the full. When he published _Waverley_ he had been reading all sorts and conditions of books for some five-and-thirty years, and assimilating them if, as the pedants will have it, with a distressing inaccuracy in particulars, with a general and genial fidelity of which the pedants do not even dream and could not comprehend, or they would not be pedants. He was thus furnished with infinite stores of illustrative matter, never to overpower, but always to accompany and season, his knowledge of life. In a few instances this felicity of adoption has been recognised, but not a tenth part of it has ever been systematically put on record. The more widely and the longer a man reads, the more constantly will he find that Scott has been before him, and has "lifted" just the touch that he wanted at the time and in the place.

But perhaps a greater gift (there were still others which it would be long to perscribe--descriptive faculty, humour, pathos, half a dozen other things of the highest importance in themselves, but of less special application) was that which enabled him to discover and apply something like a universal novel _language_. He did this, not as Shakespeare did (and as nobody but Shakespeare, except perhaps Dante to some extent, ever has done or apparently could do), by making a really universal language which fits all times and persons because it is universal like its creator's soul. Still less did he do it by adopting the method which Spenser did consummately, but which almost everybody else has justified Ben Jonson by doing very badly:--that is to say by constructing a mosaic of his own. But his own method was nearer to this latter. For historical creations (the most important of his non-historic, _Guy Mannering_ and the _Antiquary_, were so near his own time that he had no difficulty) he threw back with remarkable cunning to a period somewhat earlier, and coloured this up to the required tint by actual suggestions from contemporary, or nearly contemporary, literature, where he could get it. He has done this so consummately that perhaps the only novel of his where the language strikes us as artificial is the single one in which he actually endeavoured to be "up-to-date"--_St. Ronan's Well_.

This question of "Lingo," on the other hand, was Miss Austen's weakest point: and we have seen and shall see that it continued to be a weak point with others. Some admirers have defended her even here: but proud as I am to be an Austen Friar, a knight (or at least squire) of the order of St. Jane, I cannot go to this length. She very nearly succeeded, and sometimes she did quite: but not always. The easy dialogue and phrase that we find as early as Horace Walpole, even as Chesterfield and Lady Mary, in letters; which, in her own early days, appears in Fanny Burney's diaries but not in the novels, does not seem always within Miss Austen's grasp. But her advance in this respect is enormous: she is, for instance, far beyond Scott himself in _St. Ronan's Well_: and when she is thoroughly interested in a character, and engaged in unfolding it and gently satirising it at the same time, she rarely goes even a hair's-breadth wrong. In almost every other respect she does not go wrong to the extent of the minutest section of a hair. The story is the least part with her: but her stories are always miraculously _adequate_: neither desultory and pillar-to-post, nor elaborated with the minuteness which seems to please some people, but which is quite indifferent to the majority, and is certainly a positive nuisance to a few who are not quite of negligible judgment. But the reason of this adequacy in story contains in itself her greatest triumph. Not being a poet, she cannot reach the Shakespearian consummateness of poetic phrase: though she sometimes comes not so far short of this in the prose variety. But in the other great province of character, though hers is but a Rutland to his Yorkshire--or rather to his England or his world--she is almost equally supreme. And by her manipulation of it she showed, once for all, how the most ordinary set of circumstances, and even the most ordinary characters in a certain sense, can be made to supply the material of prose fiction to an absolutely illimitable extent. Her philosopher's stone (to take up the old parable again) does not lose its powers even when all the metal in the house is exhausted--if indeed the metal, or anything else, in the House of Humanity were exhaustible. The chairs and tables, the beds and the basins--everything--can be made into novel-gold: and, when it has been made, it remains as useful for future conversion, by the same or any other magician of the same class, as ever. One of the most curious things about Miss Austen is the entire absence of self-repetition in her. Even her young men--certainly not her greatest successes--are by no means doubles of each other: and nature herself could not turn out half a dozen girls more subtly and yet more sufficiently differentiated than Catherine and Elizabeth, Marianne and Fanny, Elinor and Emma, and finally the three sisters of _Persuasion_, the other (quite other) Elizabeth, Mary, and Anne. The "ruts of the brain" in novelists are a by-word. There are none here.

In these two great writers of English novel there is, really for the first time, the complementary antithesis after which people have often gone (I fear it must be said) wool-gathering elsewhere. The amateurs of cosmopolitan literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal and Michelet. They praise the former for his delicate and pitiless psychological analysis. It had been anticipated a dozen years, nay, nearly twenty years, before he saw the Beresina: and was being given out in print at about the very moment of that uncomfortable experience, and before he himself published anything, by a young English lady--a lady if ever there was one and English if any person ever was--in a country parsonage in Hampshire or in hired houses, quite humdrum and commonplace to the commonplace and humdrum imagination, at Bath and Southampton. They praise Michelet for his enthusiastic and multiform apprehension of the plastic reality of the past, his re-creation of it, his putting of it, live and active, before the present. The thing had been done, twenty years earlier again, by a Scotch advocate who had deliberately turned from poetic form, though he retained poetic imagination, and who did not disdain not to make a fool of himself, as Michelet, with all his genius, did again and again. Of all the essentials of the two manners of fictitious creation--Michelet's was not fictitious, but he almost made it so, and Stendhal's was not historical, but he almost made it so likewise--Scott and Miss Austen had set the types, given the methods, arranged the processes as definitely as Fust, or Coster, or Gutenberg, or Fust's friend Mephistopheles--who perhaps, on the whole, has the best title to the invention--did in another matter three hundred years before.

That Scott's variety should be taken up first, and should for a time have the great popularity, the greater number of disciples, the greater acceptance as a mode of pleasing--was, as has been pointed out, natural enough; it is not a little significant that (to avert our eyes from England) the next practitioner of the psychological style in European literature, Balzac, went through a long and mostly unsuccessful probation in the other kind, and never wholly deserted it, or at least always kept looking back to it. But the general shortcomings (as they have been admitted to be) in the whole of the second quarter of the century (or a little less) with us, were but natural results of the inevitable expatiation, unsystematic and irresolute, over the newly discovered provinces. And they gave admirable work of various kinds--work especially admirable if we remember that there was no general literary uprising with us as there was, in France and elsewhere, about 1830. If it were in any way possible--similar supposings have been admitted in literature very often--it would be extremely interesting to take a person _ex hypothesi_ fairly acquainted with the rest of literature--English, foreign, European, and classical--but who knew nothing and had heard nothing of Bulwer, Disraeli, Peacock, Marryat, even Ainsworth and James and others between Scott and the accomplished work of Thackeray (Dickens's is, as has been said, mainly a sport of genius), and to turn him loose on this work. I do him the justice to suppose that he would find not a few faults: I shall also do him the justice to think it likely that he (being, as said, _ex hypothesi_ furnished with the miscellaneous knowledge necessary to enjoy them) would enjoy them very keenly and thoroughly. If you added the minorities of the time, such as that very clever Miss Robinson (I think her name was Emma) who wrote _Whitefriars_ and other historical romances in the forties; such as Charles Macfarlane, who died, like Colonel Newcome, a poor brother of the Charterhouse after writing capital things like _The Dutch in the Medway_ and _The Camp of Refuge_--if, I say, you gave him these things and he was a good man, but lazy, like Gray, I think he would vote for a continuance of his life of novels and sofas without sighing for anything further. But undoubtedly it might be contended that something further was needed: and it came. This was verisimilitude--the holding of the true mirror to actual society.

This verisimilitude, it should be observed, is not only difficult to attain: it seems not to be easy even to recognise. I have seen it said that the reason which makes it "hopeless for many people even to try to get through _Pickwick_" (their state itself must be "hopeless" enough, and it is to be hoped there are not "many" of them) is that it "describes states of society unimaginable to many people of to-day." Again, these many people must be somewhat unimaginative. But that is not the point of the matter. The point is that Dickens depicts no "state of society" that ever existed, except in the _Dickensium Sidus_. What he gives is full of intensely real touches which help to create its charm. But it is difficult to say that there is even a single person in it who is real as a whole, in the sense of having possibly existed in this world: and the larger whole of the book generally is pure fantasy--as much so as one of the author's own favourite goblin-dream stories.

With Thackeray the case is exactly the opposite. It is a testimony no doubt to Dickens's real power--though perhaps not to his readers' perspicacity--that he made them believe that he intended a "state of society" when, whether he intended it or not, he certainly has not given it. But Thackeray intended it and gave it. His is a "state of society" always--whether in late seventeenth century, early or late eighteenth, early or middle nineteenth--which existed or might have existed; his persons are persons who lived or might have lived. And it is the discovery of this art of creation by him and its parallel diffusion among his contemporaries that I am endeavouring to make clear here. Fielding, Scott to some extent, Miss Austen had had it. Dickens, till _Great Expectations_ at least, never achieved and I believe never attempted it. Bulwer, having failed in it for twenty years, struck it at last about this time, and so did, even before him, Mrs. Marsh, and perhaps others, falteringly and incompletely. But as a general gift--a characteristic--it never distinguished novelists till after the middle of the century.

It is, I think, impossible to find a better meeting and overlapping place of the old and the new novel, than that very remarkable book _Emilia Wyndham_, which has been already more than once referred to. It was written in 1845 and appeared next year--the year of _Vanity Fair_. But the author was twenty years older than Thackeray, though she survived him by nearly a dozen; she had not begun early; and she was fifty-five when she wrote _Emilia_. The not unnatural consequence is that there is a great deal of inconsistency in the general texture of the book: and that any clever cub, in the 'prentice stage of reviewing, could make columns of fun out of it. The general theme is age-old, being not different from the themes of most other novels in that respect. A half-idiotic spendthrift (he ends as very nearly an actual idiot) not merely wastes his own property but practically embezzles that of his wife and daughter; the wife dies and the daughter is left alone with an extravagant establishment, a father practically _non compos_, not a penny in her pocket after she has paid his doctor, and a selfish baronet-uncle who will do less than nothing to help her. She has loved half unconsciously, and been half consciously loved by, a soldier cousin or quasi-cousin: but he is in the Peninsular War. Absolutely no help presents itself but that of a Mr. Danby, a conveyancer, who, in some way not very consonant with the usual etiquette of his profession, has been mixed up with her father's affairs--a man middle-aged, apparently dry as his own parchments, and quite unversed in society. He helps her clumsily but lavishly: and her uncle forces her to accept his hand as the only means of saving her father from jail first and an asylum afterwards. The inevitable disunion, brought about largely by Danby's mother (an awful old middle-class harridan), follows; and the desk-and-head incident mentioned above is brought about by her seeing the (false) announcement of her old lover's death in the paper. But she herself is consistently, perhaps excessively, but it is fair to say not ridiculously, angelic; Danby is a gentleman and a good fellow at heart; and of course, after highly tragical possibilities, these good gifts triumph. The greatest danger is threatened, and the actual happy ending brought about, by an auxiliary plot, in which the actors are the old lover (two old lovers indeed), his wife (a beautiful featherhead, who has been Emilia's school-fellow and dearest friend), and a wicked "Duke of C."

Even from this sketch the tolerably expert reader of novels may discover where the weak points are likely to lie; he will be a real expert if he anticipates the strong ones without knowing the book. As was formerly noticed, the dialogue is ill supplied with diction. The date of the story is 1809: and the author had for that period a fairly safe pattern in Miss Austen: but she does not use it at all, nor does she make the lingo frankly that of her own day. There are gross improbabilities--Mr. Danby, for instance (who is represented as wrapped up in his business, and exclusively occupied with the legal side of money matters and the money side of the law), actually discharges, or thinks he is discharging, hundreds and thousands of Mr. Wyndham's liabilities by handing his own open cheques, not to the creditors, not to any one representing them, but to a country attorney who has succeeded him in the charge of the debts and affairs, and whom he knows to be a sharp practitioner and suspects to be a scoundrel. The inhuman uncle and the licentious duke are mere cardboard characters: and the featherheaded Lisa talks and behaves like a mixture of the sprightly heroines of Richardson (for whom Lady Mary most righteously prescribed a sound whipping) and the gushing heroines of Lady Morgan. There is too much chaise-and-four and laudanum-bottle; too much moralising; too much of a good many other things. And yet, somehow or other, there are also things very rarely to be found in any novel--even taking in Bulwer and the serious part of Dickens--up to the date. The scene between Danby and his mother, in the poky house in Charlotte Street, when she discovers that he has been giving a hundred-pound cheque to a young lady is impressingly good: it is not absolutely unsuggestive of what Thackeray was just doing, and really not far from what Trollope was not for some years to do. There are other passages which make one think of George Eliot, who indeed might have been writing at the very time; there are even faint and faltering suggestions of Ibsenic "duty to ourselves." Mr. Danby (the characters regularly call each other "Mr.," "Mrs.," and "Miss," even when they are husbands and wives, daughters or nieces, and uncles or fathers) is a miss, and not quite a miss, of a very striking, original, possible, and even probable character. His mother, with something more of the Dickensian type-character, can stand by her unpleasant self, and came ten years before "the Campaigner." Susan, her pleasanter servant, is equally self-sufficing, and came five years before Peggotty, to whom she is not without resemblances.[28]

[28] Another novel of Mrs. Marsh-Caldwell's, _Norman's Bridge_,
has strong suggestions of _John Halifax_, and is ten years
older.

But it is not so much the merits on the one hand, or the defects on the other, of the book that deserve attention here and justify the place given to it: it is the general "chip-the-shell" character. The shell is only being chipped: large patches of it still hamper the chicken, which is thus a half developed and half disfigured little animal. All sorts of didactics, of Byronic-Bulwerish sentiment, of conventionalities of various kinds, still hold their place; the language, as we have said, is traditional and hardly even that; and the characters are partly drawn from Noah's Arks of various dates, partly from the stock company of the toy theatre. On the other hand, besides the touches of modernity already mentioned, and assisting them, there is a great attention to "interiors." The writer has, for her time, a more than promising sense of the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style of George II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street and Chancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forward scholar of Dickens, or had discovered the thing on her own account. Her age may excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence of the strong ones all the more remarkable: and it shows all the more forcibly how the general influences which were to produce the great central growth of Victorian novel were at work, and at work almost violently, in the business of pulling down the old as well as of building up the new.

Of that new novel it is not necessary to say much more. In the last fifty or sixty years of the nineteenth century it did, as it seems to me, very great things--so great that, putting poetry, which is supreme, aside, there is no division of the world's literature within a time at all comparable to its own which can much, if at all, excel it. It did these great things because partly of the inscrutable laws which determined that a certain number of men and women of unusual power should exist, and should devote themselves to it, partly of the less heroic-sounding fact that the general appetite of other men and womenkind could make it worth while for these persons of genius and talent not to do something else. But even so, the examination, rightly conducted, discovers more than a sufficient dose of nobility. For the novel appeal is not, after all, to a mere blind animal thirst for something that will pass and kill time, for something that will drug or flutter or amuse. Beyond and above these things there is something else. The very central cause and essence of it--most definitely and most keenly felt by nobler spirits and cultivated intelligences, but also dimly and unconsciously animating very ordinary people--is the human delight in humanity--the pleasure of seeing the men and women of long past ages living, acting, and speaking as they might have done, those of the present living, acting, speaking as they do--but in each case with the portrayal not as a mere copy of particulars, but influenced with that spirit of the universal which is the secret and the charm of art. It is because the novels of these years recognised and provided this pleasure in a greater degree than those of the former period (except the productions of a few masters) that they deserve the higher position which has been here assigned them. If the novels of any period, before or since or to come, have deserved, may or shall deserve, a lower place--it is, and will be, because of their comparative or positive neglect of the combination of these conditions. Perhaps it is not easy to see what new country there is for the novel to conquer. But, as with other kinds of literature, there is practically no limit to its powers of working its actual domains. In the finest of its already existing examples it hardly yields in accomplishment even to poetry; in that great secondary (if secondary) office of all Art--to redress the apparent injustice, and console for the apparent unkindness, of Nature--to serve as rest and refreshment between those exactions of life which, though neither unjust nor unkind, are burdensome, it has no equal among all the kinds of Art itself.

INDEX

_Adam Bede_ Adams, W. Addison _Adeline Mowbray_ Aelfric _Agathos_ Ainsworth, H. _Alton Locke_ _Amadis_ _Amelia_ _Amis and Amillion_ Amory, Thomas _Anabasis, The_ Anglo-Saxon, Romance in _Anna_ _Anna St. Ives_ _Apollonius of Tyre_ Apuleius Arblay, Madame d', _see_ Burney, F. _Arcadia, The_ _Aretina_ _Arthour and Merlin_ Arthurian Legend, the; its romantic concentration _Ask Mamma_ _Ass, The Golden_ _Atlantis, The New_ Austen, Miss

_Badman, Mr_. Bage, R. Balzac Banim _Barchester Towers_ Barrett, E.S. _Barry Lyndon_ "Barsetshire Novels," the _Battle of the Books, The_ Beaconsfield, Lord, _see_ Disraeli, B. Beckford Behn, Afra _Belinda_ Bennett, Mrs. _Bentivolio and Urania_ _Beowulf_ Bergerac, C. de Berington, S. Berkeley Berners, Lord _Bertrams, The_ _Beryn, The Tale of_ Besaut, Sir W. _Betsy Thoughtless_ _Bevis of Hampton_ Black, W. Blackmore, R.D. Blair Borrow, George Boyle, Roger, Lord Broghill and Earl of Orrery _Brambletye House_ Brontë, Charlotte Emily and Anne Brooke, H. Brunetière, M. Brunton, Mrs. Bulwer, Sir E.B. Lytton (1st Lord Lytton) _Buncle, The life of John_ Bunyan Burney, F. Byrne, Mrs. Byron

_Caleb Williams_ _Cambridge Freshman, The_ _Camilla_ _Canterbury Tales_ (the Misses Lee's) _Can You Forgive Her?_ _Captain Singleton_ _Castle of Otranto, The_ _Catherine_ _Catriona_ _Caxtons, The_ _Cecilia_ Chamier, Captain _Charles O'Malley_ "Charlotte Elizabeth" Chateaubriand, 152 _Children of the Abbey, The_ _Chrestien de Troyes_ _Chronicles of Carlingford, The_ _Chrysal_ Circulating libraries, effort of _Clarissa_ Clive, Mrs. A. _Cloister and the Hearth, The_ Coleridge Collins, Wilkie _Colonel Jack_ _Complaint of Deor, The_ Congreve _Convent of Grey Penitents, The_ Coventry, F. "Coverley Papers," the Craik, Mrs. _Cranford_ _Cripps the Carrier_ Crisp, "Daddy" Croker, Crofton Croly _Crotchet Castle_ Crowe, Mrs. Crowne, John Croxall, Dr. Cumberland, R. _Cyropædia, The_

Dante _David Simple_ Defoe Dickens Diderot _Discipline_ Disraeli, B. _Divina Commedia, The_ Dumas Dunlop

Edgeworth, Miss Ellis, G., _Early English Romances_ _Emarè_ _Emilia Wyndham_ _Emma_ _English Rogue, The_ _Esmond_ _Euphues_ Eustathius Evans, Mary Ann ("George Eliot") _Evelina_

_Fair Quaker of Dea _Ferdinand Count Fathom_ Ferrier, Miss Fielding, H. Fielding, S. _Florence of Rome_ _Florice and Blancheflour_ _Fool of Quality, The_ Ford, Emmanuel _Fortunes of Nigel, The_ _Frank_ _Frank Fairlegh_ _Frank Mildmay_

Galt _Gamekeeper at Home, The_ Gaskell, Mrs. _Gawain and the Green Knight_ Geoffrey of Monmouth "George Eliot," _see_ Evans, M.A. Gilpin Glascock, Capt. Godwin, W. Goldsmith Gore, Mrs. Graves, Rev. R. Gray _Great Hoggarty Diamond, The_ Green, Sarah Grey, Mr. W.W. _Gryll Grange_ _Guadentio di Lucca_ _Gulliver's Travels_ _Guy Livingstone_ _Guy of Warwick_

Hagiology, its effect on Romance Hamilton, Anthony Hardy, Mr. _Haunted and the Haunters, The_ _Havelok the Dam_ Haywood, Eliza Hazlitt Head, R. _Heir of Redclyffe, The_ _Heliodorus_ Henley, Mr. W.E. _Henrietta Temple_ _Henry_ _Hereward the Wake_ _Hermsprong_ Herodotus _Heroine, The_ Holcroft, T. _Holy War, The_ Hook, Theodore Hope _Horn, King_ _Humphry Clinker_ Hunt, Leigh _Hypatia_

_Idalia_ _Ida of Athena_ _Iliad The_ "Imitation" (the Greek=Fiction) Inchbald, Mrs. _Incognita_ Ingelo, N. _Ipomydon_ _Isle of Pines, The_ _Italian, The_ _It is Never too Late to Mend_ _Ixion_

_Jack Wilton_ _Jacob Faithful_ James, G.P.R. _Jane Eyre_ Jefferies, R. _Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy_ _John Runcle_ _John Inglesand_ Johnson, Dr. Johnstone, C. _Jonathan Wild_ "Jorrocks," Mr. _Joseph Andrews_ _Journey from This World to the Next, A_

_Kate Coventry_ Kingsley, C. Kingsley, H. _King's Own, The_ Kirkman, F.

"Lady Mary" (Wortley-Montagu) _Lady Susan_ _Lancelot (of the Laik)_, the Scots _Last Chronicle of Barset, The_ Lawrence, G.A. Layamon Lee, the Misses "L.E.L." Lennox, Mrs. _Leoline and Sydanis_ Letter-form in novels Lever, C. Lewis, M.G. _Libertine, The_ Livy Lockhart _London_ Longus _Lorna Doone_ Lucian _Lybius Disconus_ Lydia Lyly Lytton, _see_ Bulwer

Macaulay Macdonald, George Macfarlane, C. Mackenzie, Henry Mackenzie, Sir George Malory _Man as He Is_ _Manley, Mrs._ _Man of Feeling, The_ _Mansfield Park_ Map, W. _Marianne_ (Marivaux) _Marivaux_ Marryat, Captain Marsh, Mrs. Martineau, Mrs. _Mary Barton_ Maturin, C.R. _Melincourt_ _Melmoth the Wanderer_ Melville, Mr. L. _Memoirs of a Cavalier_ Meredith, Mr. George _Merlin_ Michelet _Mill on the Floss, The_ _Misfortunes of Elphin, The_ _Mr. Midshipman Easy_ _Mr. Verdant Green_ _Mrs. Veal_ _Moll Flanders_ _Monk, The_ _Montelion_ Moore, Dr. John Morgan, Lady Morier Morley of Blackburn, Lord Morris, W. _Morte d'Arthur_, the alliterative; the metrical; Malory's Mosse, Henrietta _Mount Henneth_ _Mysteries of Udolpho, The_

Nash, T. _Nature and Art_ Neville, H. _Nightmare Abbey_ _No Name_ _North and South_ _Northanger Abbey_ _Novelist, The_ _Novella_, the Italian, influence of

_Oceana_ _Odyssey, The_ _Old English Baron, The_ _Old Manor House, The_ Oliphant, Mrs. Opie, Mrs. _Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The_ _Ormond_ _Ornatus and Artesia_ _Oroonoko_ "Ouida" Ovid

Paget, F. _Palace of Pleasure_, Painter's Paltock, R. _Pamela_ _Pandion and Amphigeneia_ Paris, M. Gaston _Parismus and Parismenus_ _Parthenissa_ _Paul Ferroll_ Peacock, T.L. _Peep at Our Ancestors_ _Pendennis_ _Peregrine Pickle_ _Persuasion_ _Peter Simple_ _Peter Wilkins_ Petronius _Phantasies_ _Pharonnida_ _Pickwick Papers, The_ _Pilgrim's Progress, The_ Plato Poe, Edgar _Polite Conversation_ (Swift's) _Pompey the Little_ Porter, Miss _Pride and Prejudice_ _Proud King, The_ Publication, system of

_Queenhoo Hall_ _Quixote, The Female_ _Quixote, The Spiritual_

Rabelais Radcliffe, Mrs. Raleigh, Professor Sir Walter _Rasselas_ Reade, C. _Recess, The_ Reeve, Clara Rice, James _Richard Coeur de Lion_ Richardson Ritson _Robinson Crusoe_ Robinson, Emma (?) Roche, R.M. _Roderich Random_ Romance; its connection with the "Saint's Life"; not completely separable from novel; heroic _Romance Readers and Romance Writers_ _Romola_ "Rosa Matilda" _Roxana_ _Ruin, The_ _Ruth_

_St. Irvyne_ _St. Leon_ _St. Ronan's Well_ _Sayings and Doings_ "S.G.," _see_ Green, Sarah Scott, Michael Scott, Sir W. _Sense and Sensibility_ _Sentimental Journey, A_ _Seven Wise Masters, The_ Sewell, Miss _Shabby Genteel Story, A_ _Shadow of the Cross, The_ Shadwell, Charles Shebbeare Shelley Sheridan, Frances Sherwood, Mrs. _Shirley_ _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_ _Simple Story, A_ _Sir Amadas_ _Sir Charles Grandison_ _Sir Eglamour_ _Sir Eger, Sir Grame, and Sir Graysteel_ _Sir John Chiverton_ _Sir Isumhras_ _Sir Lancelot Greaves_ _Sir Launfal_ _Sir Orfeo_ _Sir Triamond_ _Sketches by Boz_ Smart, Capt. H. Smedley, Frank Smith, Charlotte Smith, Horace Smollett Socrates _Spiritual Quixote, The_ _Squire of Low Degree, The_ Staël, Mme. de Steele Stendhal Sterne Stevenson, R.L. _Strange Story, A_ Stuart, Lady L. Surtees, R. Swift _Sydney Biddulph_

_Tale of a Tub, A_ _Ten Thousand a Year_ Tennyson Terror-Novel, the Thackeray _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ Thorns Tolstoi, Count _Tom and Jerry_ _Tom Brown's Schooldays_ _Tom Cringle's Log_ _Tom Jones_ Tourguenief "Tractarian" Novel, the _Treasure Island_ _Tristram Shandy_ Tristram story, the Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Mrs. _Two Years Ago_

_Unfortunate Traveller, The_ _Urania_ _Utopia_

_Vanity Fair_ _Vathek_ _Venetia_ _Vicar of Wake field, The_ Virgil _Vision of St. Paul, The_ _Voyage Round the World_

Wace Walpole, H. _Wanderer, The_ _Warden, The_ Ward's _Catalogue of Romances_ Warren, S. _Water Babies, The_ _Watsons, The_ _Waverley_ Weber _Well at the World's End_ _Westward Ho!_ Whyte-Melville, G.J. _Wild Irish Girl, The_ Wilkinson, Sarah _William of Palerne_ Wortley-Montagu, Lady M., _see_ "Lady Mary" Wroth, Lady Mary _Wuthering Heights_

Xenophon

_Yeast_ Yonge, Miss _Ywain and Gawain_

_Zastrozzi_ Zeluco