it or not, allegory goes to
the winds. But the autobiographical form of fiction in its highest art
is the creation of Defoe. He told stories of adventure, incidents
modelled on real life as many tellers of tales had done before him, but
to the form as he found it he super-added a psychological interest--the
interest of the character of the narrator. He contrived to observe in
his writing a scrupulous and realistic fidelity and appropriateness to
the conditions in which the story was to be told. We learn about
Crusoe's island, for instance, gradually just as Crusoe learns of it
himself, though the author is careful by taking his narrator up to a
high point of vantage the day after his arrival, that we shall learn
the essentials of it, as long as verisimilitude is not sacrificed, as
soon as possible. It is the paradox of the English novel that these our
earliest efforts in fiction were meant, unlike the romances which
preceded them, to pass for truth. Defoe's _Journal of the Plague Year_
was widely taken as literal fact, and it is still quoted as such
occasionally by rash though reputable historians. So that in England the
novel began with realism as it has culminated, and across two centuries
Defoe and the "naturalists" join hands. Defoe, it is proper also in this
place to notice, fixed the peculiar form of the historical novel. In his
_Memoirs of a Cavalier_, the narrative of an imaginary person's
adventures in a historical setting is interspersed with the entrance of
actual historical personages, exactly the method of historical romancing
which was brought to perfection by Sir Walter Scott.

(2)

In the eighteenth century came the decline of the drama for which the
novel had been waiting. By 1660 the romantic drama of Elizabeth's time
was dead; the comedy of the Restoration which followed, witty and
brilliant though it was, reflected a society too licentious and
artificial to secure it permanence; by the time of Addison play-writing
had fallen to journey-work, and the theatre to openly expressed
contempt. When Richardson and Fielding published their novels there was
nothing to compete with fiction in the popular taste. It would seem as
though the novel had been waiting for this favourable circumstance. In a
sudden burst of prolific inventiveness, which can be paralleled in all
letters only by the period of Marlowe and Shakespeare, masterpiece after
masterpiece poured from the press. Within two generations, besides