Richardson and Fielding came Sterne and Goldsmith and Smollett and Fanny
Burney in naturalism, and Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe in the new
way of romance. Novels by minor authors were published in thousands as
well. The novel, in fact, besides being the occasion of literature of
the highest class, attracted by its lucrativeness that under-current of
journey-work authorship which had hitherto busied itself in poetry or
plays. Fiction has been its chief occupation ever since.

Anything like a detailed criticism or even a bare narrative of this
voluminous literature is plainly impossible without the limits of a
single chapter. Readers must go for it to books on the subject. It is
possible here merely to draw attention to those authors to whom the
English novel as a more or less fixed form is indebted for its peculiar
characteristics. Foremost amongst these are Richardson and Fielding;
after them there is Walter Scott. After him, in the nineteenth century,
Dickens and Meredith and Mr. Hardy; last of all the French realists and
the new school of romance. To one or other of these originals all the
great authors in the long list of English novelists owe their method
and their choice of subject-matter.

With Defoe fiction gained verisimilitude, it ceased to deal with the
incredible; it aimed at exhibiting, though in strange and memorable
circumstances, the workings of the ordinary mind. It is Richardson's
main claim to fame that he contrived a form of novel which exhibited an
ordinary mind working in normal circumstances, and that he did this with
a minuteness which till then had never been thought of and has not since
been surpassed. His talent is very exactly a microscopical talent; under
it the common stuff of life separated from its surroundings and
magnified beyond previous knowledge, yields strange and new and deeply
interesting sights. He carried into the study of character which had
begun in Addison with an eye to externals and eccentricities, a minute
faculty of inspection which watched and recorded unconscious mental and
emotional processes.

To do this he employed a method which was, in effect, a compromise
between that of the autobiography, and that of the tale told by an
invisible narrator. The weakness of the autobiography is that it can
write only of events within the knowledge of the supposed speaker, and
that consequently the presentation of all but one of the characters of
the book is an external prese