NOVEL, the name given in literature to a sustained story which is not historically true, but might very easily be so. The novel has been made the vehicle for satire, for instruction, for political or religious exhortation, for technical information ; but these are side issues. Its plain and direct purpose is to amuse by a succession of scenes painted from nature, and by a thread of emotional narrative. It was not until the 18th century that it began to be a prominent factor in literary life, and not until the 19th that it took a place in it which was absolutely predominant.
It was Voltaire, in his Pyrrhonisme de l'Itistoire, who set the fashion of calling the Cyropaedeia a novel, but it is probable that Xenophon had a purpose that was didactic and historical rather than imaginative. The vogue of the novel really began in Alexandrian times, when social life was so far settled in tradition that the pleasure of reflecting on reality had definitely set in. In the 2nd century B.C. a certain Aristides wrote, in six books, the Milesiaka, which was probably the beginning of the modern novel. These Tales of Miletus, the town in which Aristides lived, are lost, but from existing imitations of them in Greek and Latin we can gather that they consisted of humorous and sarcastic episodes of contemporary life. There seems to be good evidence that the bulk of these novelettes, and of the tales which followed them, dealt mainly with the adventures of lovers. In the 2nd century A.D. Lucian preserved for us invaluable pictures of the life in which he moved : his Lucius or the Ass and his True His tory are fantastic and extraordinary fictions in which the nature of the novel is not infrequently approached. But a Syrian Chris tian, Heliodorus, bishop of Tricca in the 4th century, may claim to have come much closer to it in his Aethiopica, which has the unique merit of being a perfectly pure love story, in which the marvellous is not absolutely banished, but in which on the whole the solid structure of experience is preserved. In the 6th century, as is supposed, a Greek who is called Longus, but of whose life nothing is known, wrote the voluptuous pastoral story of Daphnis and Chloe, which is far superior to all other remnants of Greek fiction which have come down to us, and is the only one of them which can strictly be called a novel. In Latin literature, the Golden Ass of Apuleius is manifestly a translation of a lost Greek book, to which Lucian also was indebted. If the Satyri con of Petronius was not an isolated phenomenon—and it is highly improbable that this was the case—then the Romans of the Neronian epoch understood to the full the secret of how to pro duce in prose a satirical, not to say cynical, study of manners in fiction. The Satyricon is not less skilfully managed than such later novels as Gil Blas or Peregrine Pickle, and it is of the same class. From the extent of the principal episode which has been preserved, it is supposed that this novel was not a short tale of intrigue, but was sustained record, drawn up with careful and lengthy observation of manners, for the single purpose of entertainment. Unfortunately this extraordinary work remains not merely solitary in its class, but itself a fragment. In early Christian times, such books as The Shepherd of Hernias, and the productions of Palladius and of Synesius, testified to a certain appetite for prose fiction.
Masuccio imitated no one; his conceptions and his observations are wholly his own. His Novellino, printed at Naples in 1476, is divided into five books, each containing ten stories. These deal satirically with the three favourite subjects of the age—namely, jealous husbands, unfaithful wives and debauched priests. He was followed in this, as well as in his vivacity, by Antonio Cornazzano (1431?-1500?), an inhabitant of Piacenza, who wrote Italian with much greater purity than Masuccio, but less vigour. His stories were frequently reprinted, under the title of Proverbii. Of the novels of Giovanni Brevio (1480?-1562?) only five have been pre served, but these are of unusual merit. We then reach Matteo Bandello (148o-1561), long the most famous of all the Italian novelists, whose Novelle, first issued in 1554, were eagerly read in all parts of Europe; they are 214 in number. After Bandello the decline of the Italian novella is evident. Francesco Maria Molza (1489-1544), whose stories appeared in 1547, was a rival to Bandello, and has been preferred to him by several modern critics. The Ragionamenti d'Amor (1548) of Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1545) was the work of a poet writing in richly embroidered prose. After Firenzuola the great school of Italian story-tellers declined. There was no more novel writing of any importance in Italy until the close of the 18th century, when an admiring study of German literature produced romances of Alessandro Verri (1741-1816) and Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827). The first Italian novelist of merit in recent times, however, is Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873), whose I Promessi Sposi (1825) enjoyed an un bounded popularity. Manzoni had imitators, but no rivals. In the fourth quarter of the 19th century Italy produced some brilliant and original novelists, in particular Giovanni Verga (184o-1922), Matilda Serao (1856-1927) and Gabriele d'Annunzio (b. 1863). France.—It was not until about 1450 that the anonymous Quinze joies du mariage showed the French to be influenced by the Italian discovery of the novelette of manners. The author of this extraordinary work was perhaps Antoine de la Sale who seems certainly to have written the whole of the Cent nouvelles nou velles, imitated from Boccaccio and Sacchetti. This bud of realis tic fiction, however, was immediately nipped by the romances of chivalry, of Spanish extraction, which were only destroyed by the vogue of Don Quixote. The translation of Montalvo's celebrated Amadis de Gaula enjoyed at this time an extraordinary popularity. The habit of telling tales freely in prose was not, however, formed in France until after 1 Soo. Bonaventure Desperiers (d. 1544) was the author of the Cymbalum mundi and of Nouvelles recreations, mordant satires and gay stories. Probably to this age also belongs the semi-fabulous Beroalde de Verville, who is sup posed to be the author of a collection of facetious anecdotes and conversations, Le Moyen de Parvenir. These and other experi ments in fiction lead us up to Rabelais, whose magnificent genius adopted as its mode of address the chain of burlesque prose nar ratives which we possess in Gargantua and Pantagruel, but his in fluence on the novel is insignificant. It was half a century later that, in the romantic pastoral of Astree, published in 161o, France may be said to have achieved her first attempt at a novel. This famous book was written by Honore d'Urfe; in spite of its ab surdities it is full of talent, and succeeds, for the first time in the history of French narrative, in depicting individual character. D'Urfe was followed, with less originality, by Marin Le Roy de Gomberville (1600-74), who was the author of a Mexican ro mance, Polexandre, and by Gombauld (157o?-1666), the author of Endymion (1624): These were fictions of interminable adven tures, broken by an infinite number of episodes; they seem tedious enough to us nowadays, but with their refinement of language, and their elevation of sentiment, they fascinated readers like Mme. de Sevigne. To Gomberville, who has been called the Alexandre Dumas of the 17th century, succeeded Mlle. de Scudery (1607 1701), who preserved the romantic framework of the novel, but filled it up with modern and familiar figures disguised under an cient names. But in the meantime, the elephantine heroic ro mances were ridiculed by Charles Sorel in his Francion (1622) and Le Berger extravagant (1628). Later examples of a realistic reaction against the pompous beauty of Gomberville and Scudery were the Roman comique (1651) of Scarron and Le Roman bour geois (1666) of Furetiere.