been invented were developed and adapted to changing taste.
In particular, the rapid increase of reticence and refinement in
conversation made such a novel in letters as Smollett’s Humphrey
Clinker (1771) repulsively coarse to women of delicacy, who
were charmed on the other hand with the Evelina of Frances
Burney (1778). These two typical books are composed on the
same plan, yet essentially a whole age lies between the former
and the latter. What has been called “the novel of the testable”
now came into existence, and the 18th century was
about to close in mediocrity, when its credit was partially saved
by a development of Horace Walpole’s romance of terror in the
vigorous and sensational narratives of Anne Radcliffe (1764–1823),
whose Mysteries of Udolpho appeared in 1794. The same
year saw the publication of Caleb Williams, in which William
Godwin (1756–1836) evolved a tragic theory of politics. A finer
study than either of the works just mentioned, although not
truly a novel, was the gorgeous and sinister Vathek (1786) of
William Beckford, an oriental tale of horror. In all these books
there existed an element of grotesque mingled with romantic
colour, which announced the coming revival.
9. The two schools here indicated, and they may be roughly defined as the school of the Tea-Table and the school of the Skeleton-in-the-Cupboard, did not, however, betray their real significance until the second decade of the 19th century, when after several unimportant efforts, they developed into the novel of psychological satire and the romance of historical imagination. Two writers, the greatest who had yet attempted to address English readers through prose fiction, almost simultaneously came forward as the protagonists in these two spheres of work. Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility in 1811, Walter Scott Waverley in 1814. These were epoch-making dates; in each case a new era opened for the countless readers of novels. The first-named writer, all exactitude, conscience and literary art, worked away at her “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory”; the other, with bold and flowing brush, covered vast spaces with his stimulating and noble compositions. It is, however, to be noted that the isolation in which we now regard these great writers—a solitude à deux only broken in measure by the presence of Miss Maria Edgeworth—is an optical delusion due to the veils of distance. The bookshops from 1810 to 1820 and onwards were thronged and glutted with novels, many of them infinitely more successful, as far as sales were concerned, than the most popular of Miss Austen’s works. The novels of Miss Austen were written between 1796 and 1810, although published from 1811 to 1818; those of Sir Walter Scott date from 1814 (Waverley) to 1829 (Anne of Geierstein). Practically speaking, no additions were made to the formula of the social novel or of the historical romance, to the study of national manners, that is to say, from the satirical or from the picturesque point of view, until a quarter of a century later.
10. The next artist in prose fiction whose force of invention was sufficient to start the novel on wholly fresh tracks was born forty years later than Scott. This was Charles Dickens, whose Pickwick Papers (1836) marks another epoch in novel writing. His career of prodigal production ceased abruptly in 1870, by which time it had long been obvious that he was the pioneer of a great and diverse school of novelists, all born within the second decade of the century. Of these Thackeray was not really made obvious until Vanity Fair (1849), nor Charlotte Brontë till Jane Eyre (1847), nor Mrs Gaskell till Mary Barton (1848), nor George Eliot till Adam Bede (1859). The most noticeable point on which the five illustrious novelists of the Early Victorian age resembled one another and differed from all their predecessors, was the sociological or even humanitarian character of their writings. All of them had projects of moral or social reform close at heart, all desired to mend the existing scheme of things. In several of them, particularly in Dickens and Miss Brontë, the element of insubordination is extremely marked; it is present in them all; and a determination not to be content to see life beautifully, through coloured glasses, or to be content with a sarcastic travesty of it, but to realize in detail its elements of pain and injustice. The novel, which had already learned to compete with all the amusing sections of literature, became the successful rival of the serious ones also. The task of the novelist was, therefore, so far as the indication of the scope of his particular kind of art is concerned, now complete. The names of Anthony Trollope, Charles Kingsley, Charles Reade, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson represent, in their least challenged form, different movements in novel-writing during the second half of the 19th century; we must be content here to refer for particulars concerning them to the separate biographical articles.
11. Spain.—Prose narrative in Spain practically begins in the 15th century with chronicles and romances of chivalry, tempered occasionally and faintly by some knowledge of what had been attempted in Italy by Boccaccio. The Spanish version of Amadés de Gaula, in which the romance of knight errantry culminated, belongs to 1508; the lost original is supposed to have been Portuguese. This was the only book of its class which is saved from the burning in Don Quixote; it was followed by Palmerin of England. These interminable books, and a hundred worse than they, occupied the leisure of 16th-century readers of both sexes. Without approaching the form of novels, they prepared the ground for novel-reading. The exploration of America led to the composition of monstrous tales of the New World, which generally took the form of continuations of Amadés. A new thing was begun in 1554, when the anonymous picaresque romance of Lazarillo de Tormes started the story of fantastic modern adventure; this highly entertaining book has been called the 16th-century Pickwick, and Mr Fitzmaurice-Kelly remarks that it “fixed for ever the type of the comic prose epic.” The pastoral romance, in the hands of Jorge de Montemór (d. 1561), who wrote an insipid Diana which was popular for a while throughout Europe, took readers a step backward, away from the ultimate path of the novel. It is of interest to us, however, to note that it was in one of these “vain imaginings,” in his pastoral romance of Galatea, that Cervantes approached' the field of fiction, in 1585. Few of his peculiar merits are to be found in this early work; he turned for the present to the composition of plays. It was not until 1604 that he returned to prose fiction by printing his immortal Don Quixote, which made an epoch in the history of the novel. This book was originally intended to ridicule the already fading passion for the romances of chivalry, but it proceeded much further than that, and there is hardly any branch of fiction which may not be traced back to the splendid initiation of some chapter of Don Quixote. In 1613 Cervantes published his twelve Exemplary Novels; these are not so well known as the great romance, and they owed not a little of their form to Italian sources, but they are very brilliant. One of the best anonymous Spanish stories of the period, The Mock Aunt, is a type of excellence in facetious narrative of the sarcastic class; this is now commonly attributed to Cervantes himself. No other novelist of Spain has moulded the thought of Europe, but the heroic romance which occupied so much of the attention of France in the 17th century was invented by a little-known Spanish soldier, Pérez de Hita, who, about 1600, wrote fantastic stories about Granada and the Moors. The farcical romance of Fray Gerundio de Campazas, 1758, by J. F. de Isla (1703–1718), competed in popularity with Gil Blas. Speaking broadly, however, Spain made no appreciable progress in novel-writing from the days of Cervantes to those of Walter Scott, when the Waverley Novels began to find such artless imitators as Martinez de la Rosa and Zorrilla. But the first original novelist of Spain was Cecilia Böhl de Faber (Fernán Caballero) (1796–1877), whose La Gaviota, 1848, a study of life in an Andalusian village, was the earliest Spanish novel, in the modern sense. She was followed by Valera (1824–1904), by Alarcón (1833–1891), by Pereda (b. 1834), by Perez Galdós (b. 1845) and by Palacio Valdés (b. 1853), in whom the tendencies of recent European fiction have been competently illustrated without any striking contributions to originality.
12. Germany.—The cultivation of the novel in its proper sense began late in Germany. It is usual to consider that H. J. C. von Grimmelshausen (1625?–1675) is the earliest German novelist;
