Scudery romances, or the mere fable-land of others. Any critical
Brown ought to have discovered "great capabilities" in it; and though it
was not for more than another century that the true historical novel got
itself born, this was almost the nearest experiment to it. But the other
side--the purely sentimental--let us not say psychological--side, is of
far more consequence; for here we have not merely aspiration or
chance-medley, we have attainment.

There is a not wholly discreditable prejudice against abridgments,
especially of novels, and more especially against what are called
condensations. But one may think that the simple knife, without any
artful or artless aid of interpolated summaries, could carve out of _La
Princesse de Cleves_, as it stands, a much shorter but fully
intelligible presentation of its passionate, pitiful subject. A slight
want of _individual_ character may still be desiderated; it is hardly
till _Manon Lescaut_ that we get that, but it was not to be expected.
Scarcely more to be expected, but present and in no small force, is that
truth to life; that "knowledge of the human heart" which had been
hitherto attempted by--we may almost say permitted to--the poet, the
dramatist, the philosopher, the divine; but which few, if any, romancers
had aimed at. This knowledge is not elaborately but sufficiently "set"
with the halls and _ruelles_ of the Court, the gardens and woods of
Coulommiers; it is displayed with the aid of conversation, which, if it
seems stilted to us, was not so then; and the machinery employed for
working out the simple plot--as, for instance, in the case of the
dropped letter, which, having originally nothing whatever to do with any
of the chief characters, becomes an important instrument--is sometimes
far from rudimentary in conception, and very effectively used.

It is therefore no wonder that the book did two things--things of
unequal value indeed, but very important for us. In the first place, it
started the School of "Sensibility"[280] in the novel, and so provided a
large and influential portion of eighteenth-century fiction. In the
second--small as it is--it almost started the novel proper, the class of
prose fiction which, though it may take on a great variety of forms and
colours, though it may specialise here and "extravagate" there, yet in
the main distinguishes itself from the romance by being first of all
subjective--by putting behaviour, passion, temperament, charac