-from curiously different sides and in
as curiously different manners--the death-blow to the notion that the
novel was an inferior if not actually discreditable kind, suitable for
weak intellects only, and likely to weaken strong ones, frivolous when
not positively immoral, giving a distaste for serious reading, implying
in the writer an inability to do anything more serious, and generally
presenting a glaring contrast to real "literature."

Interesting as each of these two great novelists is individually, the
interest of the pair, from our present historical point of view, is
almost greater; and the way in which they complete each other is hardly
short of uncanny. Before their time, despite the great examples of prose
fiction produced by Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and
Sterne, and the remarkable determination towards the life of ordinary
society given, or instanced, by Miss Burney; despite the immense
novel-production of the last half of the eighteenth century and the
first decade of the nineteenth--it is hardly too much to say that "the
novel," as such, had not found its proper way or ways at all. Bunyan's
was an example of genius in a peculiar kind of the novel: as, in a very
different one, was Sterne's. Defoe, possessing some of the rarest gifts
of the novelist, was quite lacking in others. Richardson was not only
_exemplar vitiis imitabile_ and _imitatum_, but it might be doubted
whether, even when not faulty, he was not more admirable than
delightful. Smollett, like Defoe, was not much more than part of a
novelist: and Miss Burney lacked strength, equality, and range. There
remained Fielding: and it certainly is not here that any restrictions or
allowances will be insinuated as to Fielding's praise. But Fielding's
novels are a circle in which no one else save Thackeray has ever been
able to walk. And what we are looking for now is something rather
different from this--a masterpiece, or masterpieces, which may not only
yield delight and excite admiration in itself or themselves, but may
bring forth fruit in others--fruit less masterly perhaps, but of the
same or a similar kind. In other words, nobody's work yet--save in the
special kinds--had been capable of yielding a novel-_formula_: nobody
had hit upon the most capital and fruitful novel-ideas. And nearly
everybody had, in the kind, done work curiously and almost
incomprehensibly faulty. Of these faults, the worst, perhaps, were
classable unde