Chapter II: From Lyly to Swift (1)

During the dying-off of romance proper, or its transference from verse to prose in the late fifteenth and earlier sixteenth century, there is not very much to note about prose fiction in England. But, as the conditions of modern literature fashioned themselves, a very great influence in this as in other departments was no doubt exercised with us by Italian, as well as some by Spanish in a way which may be postponed for a little. The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth. It is a hackneyed truism that Italian society was very much more modern than any other in Europe at this time--in fact it would not be a mere paradox to say that it was, and continued to be till the later sixteenth, much more modern than it has ever been since--or till very recently. By "modern" is here meant the kind of society which is fairly cultivated, fairly comfortable, fairly complicated with classes not very sharply separated from each other, not dominated by any very high ideals, tolerably corrupt, and sufficiently business-like. The Italian _novella_, of course, admits wild passions and extravagant crimes: but the general tone of it is _bourgeois_--at any rate domestic. With its great number of situations and motives, presented in miniature, careful work is necessary to bring out the effect: and, above all, there is abundant room for study of manners, for proverbial and popular wisdom and witticism, for "furniture"--to use that word in a wide sense. Above all, the Italian mind, like the Greek, had an ethical twist--twist in more senses than one, some would say, but that does not matter. Manners, morals, motives--these three could not but displace, to some extent, mere incident: though there was generally incident of a poignant or piquant kind as well. In other words the _novella_ was actually (though still in miniature) a novel in nature as well as in name. And these _novelle_ became, as is generally known, common in English translations after the middle of the sixteenth century. Painter's huge _Palace of Pleasure_ (1566) is only the largest and best known of many translations, single and collected, of the Italian _novellieri_ and the French tale-tellers, contemporary, or of times more or less earlier.

For some time, as almost everybody knows, these collections of translated matter served a purpose--great indeed, but somewhat outside their proper department--by furnishing the Elizabethan dramatists with a large part--perhaps the larger part--of their subjects. But they very soon began to exercise it directly by suggesting the fictitious part of the prose pamphlet--a department which, though infinitely less well known than the plays, and still not very easy to know, holds almost the second position as representing the popular literature of the Elizabethan time. And they also had--in one case certainly, in the other probably--no little influence upon the two great Elizabethan works which in a manner founded the modern novel and the modern romance in English--the _Euphues_ of Lyly and the _Arcadia_ of Sir Philip Sidney.

The pamphlet stories (which are themselves often play-connected, as in the case of Lodge's _Rosalynde_ and Greene's _Pandosto_) do not require much notice, with one exception--Nash's _Jack Wilton or the Unfortunate Traveller_, to which some have assigned a position equal, or perhaps superior in our particular subject, to that of the _Arcadia_ or that of _Euphues_. This seems to the present writer a mistake: but as to appear important is (in a not wholly unreal sense) to be so, the piece shall be separately considered. The rest are mostly marred by a superabundance of rather rudimentary art, and a very poor allowance of matter. There is hardly any character, and except in a few pieces, such as Lodge's _Margarite of America_, there is little attempt to utilise new scenes and conditions. But the whole class has special interest for us in one peculiarity which makes it perhaps unreadable to any but students, and that is its saturation with the Elizabethan conceit and word-play which is sometimes called Euphuism. Nor is this wonderful, considering that more than one of these "pamphlets" is directly connected with the matter and the personages of _Euphues_ itself. To this famous book, therefore, we had better turn.

Some people, it is believed, have denied that _Euphues_ is a novel at all; and some of these some have been almost indignant at its being called one. It is certainly, with _Rasselas_, the most remarkable example, in English, of a novel which is to a great extent deprived of the _agrémens_ to which we have for some two centuries been accustomed in the kind, and, to a still greater, loaded with others which do not appeal to us. To put aside altogether its extraordinary and in a way epoch-making style, which gives it its main actual place in the history of English literature, it is further loaded with didactic digressions which, though certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in the kind, have never been quite equalled--no, not in _Rasselas_ itself or the _Fool of Quality_. But if anybody, who has the necessary knowledge to understand, and therefore the necessary patience to tolerate, these knotty knarry envelopes, insertions, and excrescences, will for the moment pay no attention to them, but merely strip them off, he will find the carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind. The first plot of Philautus--Euphues--Lucilla, and the successive jilting of the two friends for each other and for Curio, is no mean novel-substance. Not Balzac himself, certainly no one of his successors, need disdain it: and more than one of them has taken up something like it. The journey from Naples to London, and the episode of Fidus and Iffida, could have been worked up, in the good old three-volume days, to a most effective second volume. And the picture of the court, with the further loves of Philautus, Camilla, and the "violet" Frances, would supply a third of themselves even if Euphues were left out, though some livelier presentation of his character (which Lyly himself was obviously too much personally interested to make at all clear) would improve the whole immensely. But it was still too early: the thing was not yet to be done. Only, I do not know any book in which the possibilities, and even the outlines, of this thing were indicated and vaguely sketched earlier in any European language, unless it be the _Lucretia and Euryalus_ of Æneas Silvius, which is much more confined in its scope.

The fact is that the very confusedness, the many undeveloped sides, of _Euphues_, make it much more of an ancestor of the modern novel than if it were more of a piece. The _quicquid agunt homines_ is as much the province of the novel as of the satire; and there is more than something of this as it affected Elizabethan times in _Euphues_. Men's interest in morals, politics, and education; their development of the modern idea of society; their taste for letters; their conceits and fancies--all these appear in it.

The _Arcadia_ stands in a different compartment. _Euphues_ is very much _sui generis_: failure as it may be from some points of view, it deserves the highest respect for this, and like most other things _sui generis_ it was destined to propagate the genus, if only after many days. The _Arcadia_ was in intention certainly, and to great extent in actual fact, merely a carrying out of the attempt, common all over Europe (as a result of the critical searchings of heart of the Italians), to practise a new kind--the Heroic Romance of the sub-variety called pastoral. The "heroic" idea generally was (as ought to be, but perhaps is not, well known) to blend, after a fashion, classical and romantic characteristics--to substitute something like the classic unity of fable or plot for the mere "meandering" of romantic story, and to pay at least as much attention to character as the classics had paid, instead of neglecting it altogether, as had recently though not always been the case in Romance. But the scheme retained on the other hand the variety of incident and appeal of this latter: and especially assigned to Love the high place which Romance had given it. As for the Pastoral--that is almost a story to itself, and a story which has been only once (by Mr. W.W. Greg) satisfactorily, and then not quite completely, told. It is enough to say here, and as affecting our own subject, that it supplied a new opportunity of gratifying the passion of the Renaissance for imitating antiquity, at the same time permitting to no small extent the introduction of things that were really romantic, and above all providing a convention. The Heroic romance generally and the Pastoral in particular went directly back to the Greek romances of Heliodorus and Longus: but they admitted many new and foreign elements.

At the same time, bastard as the heroic romance was, it could not but exercise an important influence on the future of fiction, inasmuch as it combined, or attempted to combine, with classical unity and mediæval variety the more modern interest of manners and (sometimes) personality. Sidney's attempt (which, it must be remembered, is not certainly known to be wholly his as it stands, and _is_ certainly known not to have been revised by him for publication) exercised a very great influence in English. For its popularity was enormous, and it doubtless served as shoehorn to draw on that of the English translations of French and Spanish romance which supplied, during the greater part of the seventeenth century, the want of original composition of the kind. The unconscionable amount of talk and of writing "about it and about it" which _Euphues_ and the minor Euphuist romances display is at least as prominent in the _Arcadia_: and this talk rarely takes a form congenial to the modern novel reader's demands. Moreover, though there really is a plot, and a sufficient amount of incident, this reader undoubtedly, and to no small extent justly, demands that both incident and plot shall be more disengaged from their framework--that they should be brought into higher relief, should stand out more than is the case. Yet further, the pure character-interest is small--is almost nonexistent: and the rococo-mosaic of manners and sentiment which was to prove the curse of the heroic romance generally prevents much interest being felt in that direction.[1] It would also be impossible to devise a style less suited to prose narrative, except of a very peculiar kind and on a small scale, than that either of _Euphues_ or of the _Arcadia_, which, though an uncritical tradition credits it with driving out Lyly's, is practically only a whelp of the same litter. Embarrassed, heavy, rhetorical, it has its place in the general evolution of English prose, and a proper and valuable place too. But it is bad even for pure romance purposes: and nearly hopeless for the panoramic and kaleidoscopic variety which should characterise the novel. To the actual successors of the _Arcadia_ in English we shall come presently.

[1] As a work of general literature, the attraction of the
_Arcadia_ is of course much enhanced by, if it does not chiefly
depend upon, its abundant, varied, and sometimes charming
verse-insets. But, as a novel, it cannot count these.

_The Unfortunate Traveller_ is of much less importance than the other two. It has obtained such reputation as it possesses, partly because of its invention or improvement of the fable of "Surrey and Geraldine"; more, and more justly, because it does work up a certain amount of historical material--the wars of Henry VIII. in French Flanders--into something premonitory (with a little kindness on the part of the premonished) of the great and long missed historical novel; still more for something else. Nash, with his quick wit, seems to have been really the first to perceive the capabilities of that foreign travel and observation of manners which was becoming common, stripped of the special atmosphere of pilgrimage which had formerly enveloped it. Even here, he had had the "notion of the notion" supplied to him by Lyly in _Euphues_: and a tolerably skilful advocate would not have so very much difficulty in claiming the book as one of the tribe of Euphuist pamphlets. But Jack Wilton the "traveller" is a little more of a person than the pedagogic Euphues and the shadowy Philautus. At any rate he has a very strong anticipation of Defoe, whose "Cavalier" was not improbably suggested by him. But Nash has neither the patience of Defoe, nor that singular originality, which accompanies in the author of _Moll Flanders_ a certain inability to make the most of it. _The Unfortunate Traveller_ is a sort of compilation or congeries of current _fabliaux, novelle_, and _facetiæ_, with the introduction of famous actual persons of the time, from the crowned heads of the period, through Luther and Aretine downwards, to give bait and attraction. Sometimes it reminds one of a working up of the _Colloquies_ of Erasmus: three centuries earlier than _The Cloister and the Hearth_, with much less genius than Charles Reade's, and still more without his illegitimate advantage of actual novels behind him for nearly half the time. But it gives us "disjectæ membra _novellæ_" rather than a novel itself: and the oftener one reads it the more clear one is that the time for writing novels had not yet come. The materials are there; the desire to utilise--and even a faint vague idea of _how_ to utilise--them is there; but the art is almost completely absent. Even regarded as an early attempt in the "picaresque" manner, it is abortive and only half organised.

The subject of the English "Heroic" Romance, in the wide sense, is one which has been very little dealt with. Dunlop neglected it rather surprisingly, and until Professor Raleigh's chapter on the subject there was little of a satisfactory kind to be found about it anywhere. It must, however, be admitted that the abstainers from it have been to some extent justified in their abstention. The subject is a curious one: and it has an important place in the history of the Novel, because it shows at once how strong was the _nisus_ towards prose fiction and how surprisingly difficult writers seem, nevertheless, to have found it to hit upon anything really good, much more anything really original in kind. For it is hardly too much to say that this century of attempt--we cannot call it a century of invention--from Ford to Congreve, does not add a single piece of any considerable merit to the roll of English books. As for a masterpiece, there is nothing in respect of which the use of such a word would not be purely ridiculous. And yet the attempts are interesting to the historian, and should not be uninteresting to the historical student of literature. One or two of them have a sort of shadowy name and place in literary history already.

In tracing their progress and character, we must allow for two native models: and for three foreign sources, one ancient, two modern, of influence. _The Arcadia_ and _Euphues_, the former continuously, the latter by revival after an interval, exercised very great effect in the first half of the seventeenth century, during at least the earlier part of which the vogue of _Amadis_ and its successors, as Englished by Anthony Munday and others, likewise continued. The Greek romances also had much to do with the matter: for the Elizabethan translators had introduced them to the vulgar, and the seventeenth century paid a good deal of attention to Greek. Then, when that century itself was on its way, the pastoral romance of D'Urfé first, and the Calprenède-Scudéry productions in the second place, came to give a fresh impulse, and something of a new turn. The actual translations of French and Spanish romance, shorter and longer, good, bad, and indifferent, are of immense bulk and doubtless excited imitation: but we cannot possibly deal with them here. A bare list would fill a chapter. But some work of more or less (generally less) originality, in at least adaptation, calls for a little individual notice: and some general characterisation may be added.

It may be desirable to prelude the story by a reminder to the reader that the _general_ characteristics of these various sources were "harlequin" in their diversity of apparent colour. The _Amadis_ romances and, indeed, all the later examples of that great kind, such as _Arthur of Little Britain_, which Berners translated, were distinguished on the one side by a curious convention of unsmooth running of the course of love, on the other sometimes by a much greater licence of morality than their predecessors, and always by a prodigality of the "conjuror's supernatural"--witches and giants and magic black and white. The Spanish "picaresque" story was pretty real but even less decent: and its French imitations (though not usually reaching the licence of the short tale, which clung to _fabliau_ ways in this respect) imitated it here also. The French heroic romance, on the other hand, observed the most scrupulous propriety in language and situation: but aggravated the Amadisian troubling of the course of true love, and complicated everything, very frequently if not invariably, by an insinuated "key" interest of identification of the ancient personages selected as heroes and heroines with modern personages of quality and distinction.

Emanuel Ford (whom the British Museum catalogue insists on spelling Ford_e_ and of whom very little seems to be known) published _Parismus, Prince of Bohemia_, as early as 1598. In less than a hundred years (1696) it had reached its fourteenth edition, and it continued to be popular in abridged and chap-booked form[2] far into the eighteenth century. (It is sometimes called _Parismus and Parismenus_: the second part being, as very commonly in romances of the class after the _Amadis_ pattern, occupied largely with the adventures of the son of the hero of the first.) On the whole, _Parismus_, though it has few pretensions to elegance of style, and though some delicate tastes have been shocked at certain licences of incident, description, and phrase in it, is quite the best of our bunch in this kind. It is, in general conception, pure _Amadis_ of the later and slightly degraded type. Laurana, the heroine (of whom a peculiarly hideous portrait adorns the black-letter editions side by side with Parismus himself, who is rather a "jolly gentleman") is won with much less difficulty and in much less time than Oriana--but separations and difficulties duly follow in "desolate isles" and the like. And though Parismus himself is less of an Amadis than Amadis, the "contrast of friends," founded by that hero and Galaor, is kept up by his association with a certain Pollipus--"a man of his hands" if ever there was one, for with them he literally wrings the neck of the enchantress Bellona, who has enticed him to embrace her. There is plenty of the book, as there always should be in its kind (between 400 and 500 very closely printed quarto pages), and its bulk is composed of proportionately plentiful fighting and love-making and of a very much smaller proportion of what schoolboys irreverently call "jaw" than is usual in the class. If it were not for the black letter (which is trying to the eyes) I should not myself object to have no other reading than _Parismus_ for some holiday evenings, or even after pretty tough days of literary and professional work. _The Famous History of Montelion, the Knight of the Oracle_ (1633?) proclaims its Amadisian type even more clearly: but I have only read it in an abridged edition of the close of the century. I should imagine that _in extenso_ it was a good deal duller than _Parismus_. And of course the comparative praise which has been given to that book must be subject to the reminder that it is what it is--a romance of disorderly and what some people call childish adventure, and of the above-ticketed "conjuror's supernatural." If anybody cannot read _Amadis_ itself, he certainly will not read _Parismus_: and perhaps not everybody who can manage the original--perhaps not even everybody who can manage _Palmerin_--could put up with Ford's copy. I can take this Ford as I find him: but I am not sure that I would go much lower.

[2] It is pleasant to remember that one of the chief publishers
of these things in the late seventeenth century was _W.
Thackeray_.

_Ornatus and Artesia_ (1607?), on the other hand--his second or third book--strikes me as owing more to Heliodorus than to Montalvo, or Lobeira, or whoever was the author of the great romance of the last chivalric type. There are more intricacies in it; the heroine plays a rather more important part; there is even something of a nearer approach to modern novel-ways in this production, which reappeared at "Grub Street near the Upper Pump" in the year 1650. Ornatus sees his mistress asleep and in a kind of deshabille, employs a noble go-between, Adellena (a queer spelling of "Adelina" which may be intentional), is rejected with apparent indignation, of course; writes elaborate letters in vain, but overhears Artesia soliloquising confession of her love for him and disguises himself as a girl, Silvia. Then the villain of the piece, Floretus, to obtain the love of this supposed Silvia, murders a person of distinction and plots to poison Artesia herself. Ornatus-Silvia is banished: and all sorts of adventures and disguises follow, entirely in the Greek style. The book is not very long, extending only to signature R in a very small quarto. Except that it is much less lively and considerably less "free," it reminds one rather in type of Kynaston's verse _Leoline and Sydanis_. In fact the verse and prose romances of the time are very closely connected: and Chamberlayne's _Pharonnida_--far the finest production of the English "heroic" school in prose, verse, or drama--was, when the fancy for abridging set in, condensed into a tiny prose _Eromena_. But _Ornatus and Artesia_, if more modern, more decent, and less extravagant than _Parismus_, is nothing like so interesting to read. It is indeed quite possible that there is, if not in it, in its popularity, a set-back to the _Arcadia_ itself, which had been directly followed in Lady Mary Wroth's _Urania_ (1621), and to which (by the time of the edition noted) Charles I.'s admiration--so indecently and ignobly referred to by Milton--had given a fresh attraction for all good anti-Puritans. That an anti-Puritan should be a romance-lover was almost a necessity.

When the French "heroics" began to appear it was only natural that they should be translated, and scarcely less so that they should be imitated in England. For they were not far off the _Arcadia_ pattern: and they were a distinct and considerable effort to supply the appetite for fiction which has been dwelt upon. But except for this, and for fashion's sake, they did not contain much that would appeal to an English taste: and it is a little significant that one great reader of them who is known to us--Mrs. Pepys--was a Frenchwoman. Indeed, save for the very considerable "pastime" of a kind that they gave to a time, much of which required passing, it is difficult to understand their attraction for English readers. Their interminable talk never (till perhaps very recently) was a thing to suit our nation: and the "key" interest strikes us at any rate as of the most languid kind. But they _were_ imitated as well as translated: and the three most famous of the imitations are the work of men of mark in their different ways. These are the _Parthenissa_ (1654) of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill and Earl of Orrery; the _Aretina_ (1661) of Sir George Mackenzie; and the _Pandion and Amphigeneia_ (1665) of "starch Johnny" Crowne.

Boyle was a strong Francophile in literature, and his not inconsiderable influence on the development of the heroic _play_ showed it only less decidedly than his imitation of the Scudéry romance. I cannot say that I have read _Parthenissa_ through: and I can say that I do not intend to do so. It is enough to have read Sainte Madeleine of the Ink-Desert herself, without reading bad imitations of her. But I have read enough to know that _Parthenissa_ would never give me anything like the modified satisfaction that is given by _Parismus_: and after all, if a man will not take the trouble to finish writing his book (which Orrery never did) why should his readers take the trouble even to finish reading what he has written? The scene is Parthia, with alternation to Syria, and diversions and episodes elsewhere: and though there is a certain amount of fighting, the staple is quite decorous but exceedingly dull love-making, conducted partly in the endless dialogue (or rather automatic monologue) already referred to, and partly in letters more "handsome" even than Mr. Frank Churchill's, and probably a good deal more sincere in their conventional way, but pretty certainly less amusing. The original attraction indeed of this class of novel consisted, and, in so far as it still exists, may be said to consist, in noble sentiment, elegantly expressed. It deserved, and in a manner deserves, the commendatory part of Aramis's rebuke to Porthos for expressing impatience with the compliments between Athos and D'Artagnan at their first and hostile rencounter.[3] Otherwise there is not much to be said for it. It does not indeed deserve Johnson's often quoted remark as to Richardson (on whom when we come to him we shall have something more to say in connection with these heroic romances), if any one were to read _Parthenissa_ for the story he would not, unless he were a very impulsive person, "hang himself." He would simply, after a number of pages varying with the individual, cease to read it.

[3] "Quant à moi, je trouve les choses que ces messieurs se
disent fort bien dites et tout à fait dignes de deux
gentilhommes."

The work of the great Lord Advocate who was traduced by Covenanting malice is in a certain sense more interesting: and that not merely because it is much shorter. _Aretina_ or _The Serious Romance_, opens with an "apology for Romances" generally, which goes far to justify Dryden's high opinion of Mackenzie as a critic. But it cannot be said to be much--it is a little--more interesting as a story than _Parthenissa_, and it is written in a most singular lingo--not displaying the racy quaintness of Mackenzie's elder contemporary and fellow-loyalist Urquhart, but a sort of Scotified and modernised Euphuism rather terrible to peruse. A library is "a bibliotheck richly tapestried with books." Somebody possesses, or is compared to "a cacochymick stomach, which transubstantiates the best of meats in its own malignant humour." And when the hero meets a pair of cannibal ruffians he confronts one and "pulling out a pistol, sends from its barrel two balls clothed in Death's livery, and by them opens a sallyport to his soul to fly out of that nasty prison." A certain zest may be given by these oddities, but it hardly lasts out more than 400 pages: and though the lives of Aretina and Philaretes are more simply and straightforwardly told than might be thought likely--though there are ingenious disguises of contemporary politics, and though Mackenzie was both a wise man and a wit--it is more certain than ever, when we close his book, that this is not the way of the world, nor the man to walk in that way.

_Pandion and Amphigeneia_ is the inferior in importance of both these books. Crowne had perhaps rather more talent than it is usual to credit him with, but he does not show it here. I think Sir Walter Raleigh is quite right in regarding the book as more or less traced over the _Arcadia_: and it may be said to have all the defects of Sidney's scheme--which, it is fair once more to observe, we do not possess in any form definitely settled by its author--with none of the merits of his ornament, his execution, and his atmosphere of poetic fancy.

The fact is that this heroic romance was foredoomed to inefficiency. It was not a genuine _kind_ at all: but a sort of patchwork of imitations of imitations--a mule which, unlike the natural animal, was itself bred, and bred in and in, of mules for generations back. It was true to no time, to no country, to no system of manners, life, or thought. Its oldest ancestor in one sense, though not in another--the Greek romance--was itself the growth of the latest and most artificial period of the literature to which it belonged. The pure mediæval romance of chivalry was another, but of this it had practically nothing left. The _Amadis_ class, the late Renaissance pastorals, the immediately preceding or accompanying French romances of the Scudéry type, were, in increasing degree, hybrid, artificial, and dead-alive. Impotence and sterility in every sense could but be its portion. Of the two great qualities of the novel--Variety and Life--it had never succeeded in attaining any considerable share, and it had now the merest show of variety and no life at all. There is hardly anything to be said in its favour, except that its vogue, as has been observed, testified to the craving for prose fiction, and kept at least a simulacrum of that fiction before the public. How far there may be any real, though metaphysical, connection between the great dramatic output of this seventeenth century in England and its small production in novel is a question not to be discussed here. But undoubtedly the fact of the contrast is a "document in the case," and one of the most important in its own direction; completing the testimony of the mediæval period in the other (that as romance dwindled, drama grew) and leading up to that of the eighteenth century when drama dwindled and the novel grew. The practice of Afra Behn in both, and the fact that Congreve, the greatest English dramatist of the close of the century, began with a novel and deserted the style for drama, are also interesting, and combine themselves very apparently with the considerations just glanced at. But Congreve and Afra must be postponed for a moment.

The two last discussed books, with _Eromena_ and some others, are posterior to the Restoration in date, but somewhat earlier in type. The reign of Charles II., besides the "heroic" romances and Bunyan, and one most curious little production to be noticed presently, is properly represented in fiction by two writers, to whom, by those who like to make discoveries, considerable importance has sometimes been assigned in the history of the English Novel. These are Richard Head and Afra Behn, otherwise "the divine Astræa." It is, however, something of an injustice to class them together: for Afra was a woman of very great ability, with a suspicion of genius, while Head was at the very best a bookmaker of not quite the lowest order, though pretty near it. Of _The English Rogue_ (1665-1680), which earns him his place here, only the first part, and a certain section of the fourth, are even attributed to him by Francis Kirkman, the Curll of his generation, who published the thing at intervals and admittedly wrote parts of it himself. It is quite openly a picaresque novel: and imitated not merely from the Spanish originals but from Sorel's _Francion_, which had appeared in France some forty years before. Yet, if we compare this latter curious book with Head's we shall see how very far behind, even with forty years' advantage in time, was the country which, in the next century, was practically to create the modern novel. _Francion_ is not a work of genius: and it does not pretend to much more than the usual picaresque farrago of adventure, unmoral and sometimes rather cruel, but comic of a kind, strung together with little art in fable, and less in character. But the author is to some extent "cumbered about serving." He names his characters, tries to give them some vague personality, furnishes them with some roughly and sketchily painted scenery, and gives us not merely told tales, but occasionally something distantly resembling conversation. Head takes no trouble of this kind: and Kirkman does not seem to think that any such thing is required of him. Very few of the characters of _The English Rogue_ have so much as a name to their backs: they are "a prentice," "a master," "a mistress," "a servant," "a daughter," "a tapster," etc. They are invested with hardly the slightest individuality: the very hero is a scoundrel as characterless as he is nameless:[4] he is the mere thread which keeps the beads of the story together after a fashion. These beads themselves, moreover, are only the old anecdotes of "coney-catching," over-reaching, and worse, which had separately filled a thousand _fabliaux, novelle_, "jests," and so forth: and which are now flung together in gross, chiefly by the excessively clumsy and unimaginative expedient of making the personages tell long strings of them as their own experience. When anything more is wanted, accounts of the manners of foreign countries, taken from "voyage-and-travel" books; of the tricks of particular trades (as here of piratical book-selling); of anything and everything that the writer's dull fancy can think of, are foisted in. The thing is in four volumes, and it seems that a fifth was intended as a close: but there is no particular reason why it should not have extended to forty or fifty, nay to four or five hundred. It could have had no real end, just as it has no real beginning or middle.

[4] He _has_ a name, Meriton Latroon, but it is practically
never used in the actual story.

One other point deserves notice. The tone of the Spanish and French picaresque novel had never been high: but it is curiously degraded in this English example. Furetière honestly called his book _Roman Bourgeois_. Head might have called his, if he had written in French, _Roman Canaille_. Not merely the sentiments but the very outward trappings and accidents of gentility are banished from the book. Yet we do not get any real reality in compensation. Head is no Defoe: he can give us the company that Colonel Jack kept in his youth and Moll Flanders in her middle age: but he makes not the slightest attempt to give us Moll or Jack, or even Moll's or Jack's habit, environment, novel-furniture of any kind whatsoever. The receipt to make _The English Rogue_ is simply this: "Take from two to three dozen Elizabethan pamphlets of different kinds, but principally of the 'coney-catching' variety, and string them together by making a batch of shadowy personages tell them to each other when they are not acting in them." Except in a dim sort of idea that a novel should have some bulk and substance, it is difficult to see any advance whatever in this muck-heap--which the present writer, having had to read it a second time for the present purpose, most heartily hopes to be able to leave henceforth undisturbed on his shelves.

Not in this fashion must the illustrious Afra be spoken of. It is true that--since it ceased to be the fashion merely to dismiss her with a "fie-fie!" which her prose work, at any rate, by no means merits--there has sometimes been a tendency rather to overdo praise of her, not merely in reference to her lyrics, some of which can never be praised too highly, but in reference to these novels. _Oroonoko_ or _The Royal Slave_, with its celebration of the virtues of a noble negro and his love for his Imoinda, and his brutal ill-treatment and death by torture at the hands of white murderers, undoubtedly took the fancy of the public. But to see at once Rousseau and Byron in it, Chateaubriand and Wilberforce and I know not what else, is rather in the "lunatic, lover, and poet" order of vision. Even Head and Kirkman, as we have observed, had perceived the advantage of foreign scenery and travel to vary their matter; Afra had herself been in Guiana; and, as she was of a very inflammable disposition, it is quite possible that some Indian Othello had caught her fresh imagination. On the other hand, there was the heroic romance, with all its sighs and flames, still the rage: and a much less nimble intellect than Afra's, with a much less cosmopolitan experience, might easily see the use of transposing it into a new key. Still, there is no doubt that _The Royal Slave_ and even its companions are far above the dull, dirty, and never more than half alive stuff of _The English Rogue. Oroonoko_ is a story, not a pamphlet or a mere "coney-catching" jest. To say that it wants either contraction or expansion; less "talk about it" and more actual conversation; a stronger projection of character and other things; is merely to say that it is an experiment in the infancy of the novel, not a following out of secrets already divulged. It certainly is the first prose story in English which can be ranked with things that already existed in foreign literatures. Nor is it the only one of the batch in which advance is seen. "The King of Bantam," for instance, is the account of an "extravagant," though not quite a fool, who is "coney-catched" in the old manner. But it opens in a fashion very different indeed from the old manner. "This money is certainly a most devilish thing! I'm sure the want of it had been like to ruin my dear Philibella!" and the succeeding adventures are pretty freshly told. The trick of headlong overture was a favourite with Afra. "The Adventure of the Black Lady" begins, "About the beginning of last June, as near as I can remember, Bellamira came to town from Hampshire." It is a trick of course: and here probably borrowed from the French: but the line which separates trick from artistic device is an exceedingly narrow and winding one. At any rate, this plunging into the middle of things wakes up the reader's attention, and does not permit him to doze. "The Lucky Mistake," on the other hand, opens with a little landscape, "The river Loire has on its delightful banks, etc." "The Fair Jilt," a Bandello-like story, begins with an exaltation of Love: and so on. Now these things, though they may seem matters of course to the mere modern reader, were not matters of course then. Afra very likely imitated; her works have never been critically edited; and have not served as field for much origin-hunting. But whether she followed others or not, she led her own division. All these things and others are signs of an awakened conscience--of a sense of the fact that fiction, to be literature, must be something more than the relation of a bare fact, tragic, comic, or neutral--that the novelist is a cook, and must prepare and serve his materials with a sauce as much his own as possible, of plot, arrangement, character-drawing, scenery, conversation, reflection, and what not. That conversation itself--the subtlest instrument of all and the most effective for constructing character--is so little developed, can only, I think, be accounted for by supposing Afra and others to be under the not unnatural mistake that conversation especially belonged to the drama, which was still the most popular form of literature, and in which she herself was a copious practitioner. But this mistake was not long to prevail: and it had no effect on that great contemporary of hers who would, it is to be feared, have used the harshest language respecting her, and to whom we now come.

It is impossible to share, and not very easy even to understand, the scruples of those who would not admit John Bunyan to a place in the hierarchy and the pedigree of the English novel, or would at best grant him an outside position in relation to it. Their exquisite reasons, so far as one can discern them, appear to be (or to concern) the facts that _The Pilgrim's Progress_ and _The Holy War_ are religious, and that they are allegories.[5] It may be humbly suggested that by applying the double rule to verse we can exclude _Paradise Lost_ and the _Faerie Queene_ from the succession of English Poetry, whereby no doubt we shall be finely holden in understanding the same: while it is by no means certain that, if the exclusion of allegory be pushed home, we must not cancel _Don Quixote_ from the list of the world's novels. Even in prose, to speak plainly, the hesitation--unless it comes from the foolish dislike to things religious, as such, which has been the bigotry of the last generation or two--comes from the almost equally foolish determination to draw up arbitrary laws of literary kind. Discarding prejudice and punctilio, every one must surely see that, in diminishing measure, even _The Holy War_ is a novel, and that _The Pilgrim's Progress_ has every one of the four requisites--plot, character, description, and dialogue--while one of these requisites--character with its accessory manners--is further developed in the _History of Mr. Badman_ after a fashion for which we shall look vainly in any division of European literature (except drama) before it. This latter fact has indeed obtained a fair amount of recognition since Mr. Froude drew the attention of the general reader to it in his book on Bunyan, in the "English Men of Letters" series, five-and-twenty years ago: but it must have struck careful readers of the great tinker's minor works long before. Indeed there are very good internal reasons for thinking that no less a person than Thackeray must have known _Mr. Badman_. This wonderful little sketch, however--the related history of a man who is an utter rascal both in family and commercial relations, but preserves his reputation intact and does not even experience any deathbed repentance--is rather an unconscious study for a character in a novel--a sketch of a _bourgeois_ Barnes Newcome--than anything more. It has the old drawback of being narrated, not acted or spoken at first hand: and so, though it is in a sense Fielding at nearly his best, more than half a century before Fielding attempted _Joseph Andrews_, no more need be said of it. So, too, the religious element and the allegory _are_ too prominent in _The Holy War_--the novelist's desk is made too much of a pulpit in large parts of it. Other parts, concerning the inhabitants of Mansoul and their private affairs, are domestic novel-writing of nearly the pure kind: and if _The Pilgrim's Progress_ did not exist, it would be worth while to pick them out and discuss them. But, as it most fortunately does exist, this is not needful.

[5] The heroic kind had lent itself very easily and obviously to
allegory. Not very long before Bunyan English literature had
been enriched with a specimen of this double variety which for
Sir W. Raleigh "marks the lowest depth to which English romance
writing sank." I do not know that I could go quite so far as
this in regard to the book--_Bentivolio and Urania_ by Nathaniel
Ingelo. The first edition of this appeared in 1660: the second
(there seem to have been at least four) lies before me at this
moment dated 1669, or nine years before the _Progress_ itself.
You require a deep-sea-lead of uncommonly cunning construction
to sound, register, and compare the profundities of the bathos
in novels. The book has about 400 folio pages very closely
packed with type, besides an alphabetical index full of Hebrew
and Greek derivations of its names--"Gnothisauton," "Achamoth,"
"Ametameletus," "Dogmapernes," and so forth. Its principles are
inexorably virtuous; there is occasional action interspersed
among its innumerable discourses, and I think it not improbable
that if it were only possible to read it, it might do one some
good. But it would not be the good of the novel.

The only fault with the novel-character of the greater book which might possibly be found by a critic who did not let the allegory bite him, and was not frightened by the religion, is that there is next to no love element in it, though there are wedding bells. Mercy is indeed quite nice enough for a heroine: but Bunyan might have bestowed her better than on a young gentleman so very young that he had not long before made himself (no doubt allegorically) ill with unripe and unwholesome fruit. But if he had done so, the suspicions of his brethren--_they_ were acute enough as it was not to mistake the character of the book, whatever modern critics may do--would have been even more unallayable. And, as it is, the "alluring countenance" does shed not a little grace upon the story, or at least upon the Second Part: while the intenser character of the First hardly requires this. Any other lack is, to the present writer, imperceptible. The romance interest of quest, adventure, achievement, is present to the fullest degree: and what is sometimes called the pure novel interest of character and conversation is present in a degree not lower. It must be accepted as a great blessing, even by those who regard Puritanism as an almost unmitigated curse, that its principles forbade Bunyan to think of choosing the profane and abominable stage-play as the form of his creation. We had had our fill of good plays, and were beginning to drink of that which was worse: while we had no good novels and wanted them. Of course the large amount of actual "Tig and Tirry" dialogue (as Dr. Johnson would say) is probably one of the things which have made precisians shy of accepting the _Progress_ for what it really is. But we must remember that this encroachment on the dramatic province was exactly what was wanted to remove the reproach of fiction. The inability to put actual conversation of a lively kind in the mouths of personages has been indicated as one of the great defects of the novel up to this time. Except Cervantes, it is difficult to think of any novelist who had shown himself able to supply the want. Bunyan can do it as few have done it even since his time. The famous dialogue of Christian and By-ends is only the best--if it is the best--of scores nearly or quite as good. The curious intellectual flaccidity of the present day seems to be "put off" by the "ticket" names; but no one who has the true literary sense cares for these one way or another, or is more disturbed by them than if they were Wilkins and Jones. Just as Coleridge observed that to enjoy some kinds of poetry you must suspend disbelief, so, with mere literary fashions, you must suspend disagreement. We should not call By-ends By-ends now: and whether we should do better or worse nobody, as Plato says, knows but the Deity. But the best of us would be hard put to it to make By-ends reveal his By-endishness more perfectly than he does by his conversation, and without any ticket-name at all.

Not less remarkable, and only a little less new, is the vividness and sufficiency of the scene painting and setting. It has been said that the great novelists not only provide us with a world of friends more real and enjoyable than the actual folk we know, but also with a world for those friends to live in, more real and far more enjoyable than the world in which we ourselves sojourn. And this is well seen of Christian. The Slough of Despond and the terrible overhanging hill; the gateway and the Interpreter's House and the House Beautiful; the ups and downs of the road, and the arbours and the giants' dens: Beulah and the Delectable Mountains:--one knows them as one knows the country that one has walked over, and perhaps even better. There is no description for description's sake: yet nothing is wanting of the descriptive kind.

Yet all these things are--as they should be--only subsidiary to the main interest of the Pilgrimage itself. Once more, one may fear that it is no good sign of the wits of the age that readers should be unable to discard familiarity with the argument of the story. It is the way in which that argument is worked out and illustrated that is the thing. I have never myself, since I became thoroughly acquainted with Lydgate's Englishing of Deguilevile's _Pilgrimage of the Soul of Man_, had any doubt that--in some way or other, direct or indirect, at tenth or twentieth hand perhaps--Bunyan was acquainted with it: but this is of no importance. He might undoubtedly have got all his materials straight out of the Bible. But his working of them up is all his own, and is wonderful. Here, to begin with, is the marvel not merely of a continuation which is not a falling off, but of a repetition of the same general scheme with different but closely connected personages, which is entirely free from monotony. One is so accustomed to the facts that perhaps it hardly strikes one at first how extraordinarily audacious the attempt is: nay, the very success of it may blind all but critics to the difficulty. It is no wonder that people tried further continuations and further complications: still less wonder that they utterly failed. Probably even Bunyan himself could not have "done it a third time." But he did it these twice with such vividness of figure and action; such completeness of fable; such sufficiency of behaviour and of speech as have scarcely ever been equalled. As ideal as Spenser, as real as Defoe: such is Bunyan. And he shows this realism and this idealism in a prose narrative, bringing the thoughts and actions and characters and speech of fictitious human beings before his readers--for their inspection perhaps; for their delight certainly. If this is not the being and the doing of a novelist this deponent very humbly declareth that he knoweth not what the being and the doing of a novelist are.

We must now turn to two small but noteworthy attempts at the kind, which have been referred to above.

In 1668 there appeared a very curious little book (entitled at great length after the manner of the times, but more shortly called _The Isle of Pines_), which is important in the literary ancestry of Defoe and Swift and not unimportant in itself. Its author was Henry Neville, of the Nevilles of Billingbeare, son of one Sir Henry and grandson of another, the grandfather having been of some mark in diplomacy and courtiership in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times. The grandson had had a life of some stir earlier. Born in 1620, and educated at Merton and University Colleges, he had left Oxford without a degree, had taken the Parliamentary side, but as a rigid Republican and anti-Cromwellite; had been a member of the Rota, and after the Restoration had been arrested in 1663 for supposed treasonable practices, but escaped serious punishment. He lived quietly for more than thirty years longer and died in 1694. Besides _The Isle of Pines_ he wrote satirical tracts (the _Parliament of Ladies_ being the best known), translated Machiavelli, and was evidently a man of parts, though, like his friend Harrington, something of a "crank." He seems also to have been, as some others of the extremer Puritans certainly were, pretty loose in his construction of moral laws.

_The Isle_ is a very short book of thirty-one quarto pages: but there is a good deal in it, and it must have been very carefully written. A certain Cornelius van Sloetten writes, "supported by letters from Amsterdam," how a Dutch ship, driven far out of reckoning in the Southern Ocean, comes to a "fourth island, near Terra Australis Incognita," which is inhabited by white people, speaking English, but mostly naked. The headman is a certain William Pine, whose grandfather, George, has left a written account of the origin of the community. This relates how George was wrecked on the island, the ship perishing "with man and mouse," except himself, his master's daughter, two white maidservants, and a negro girl. The island proves pleasant and habitable: and George, to prevent unfairness and ill-feeling, unites himself to all his female companions, the quintet living in perfect harmony. Thirty-seven children result: and these at first necessarily intermarry; but after this first generation, a rule is made that brothers and sisters may not unite--the descendants of the four original wives forming clans who may marry into the others but not into their own. A wider legal code of fair stringency is arranged, with the sanction of capital and other punishments: and things go so well that the patriarch musters a tribe of 565 persons by the time he is sixty, and of 1789 twenty years later, when he departs this life, piously praying God "to multiply them and send them the true report of the gospel." The multiplication has duly taken place, and there is something like a civil war while the Dutch are there; but they interfere with fire-arms to restore order, and leave all well. The writer's cunning is shown by the fact that he does not stop abruptly: but finishes off with some subsequent and quite _verisimilar_ experiences of the Dutch ship. The book does not appear to have had a very great popularity in England, though it was reprinted and abridged at least once, pretty shortly. But it was very popular abroad, was translated into three or four languages, and was apparently taken as a genuine account.