All these, however, were mere preparations. The earliest novel ist of France is Marguerite de la Vergne, comtesse,de La Fayette (1634-93), and the earliest genuine French novels were her Prin cesse de Montpensier (1662), and her far more important Prin cesse de Cleves (1678). Mme. de La Fayette was the first writer of prose narrative in Europe who portrayed, as closely to nature as she could, the actual manner and conversations of well-bred people. To show that she was capable of writing in the old style, she published, with the help of Segrais, in 167o, a Zayde, which is in the Spanish manner affected by Mlle. de Scudery. It was long before the peculiar originality of the Princesse de Cleves was appreciated. Meanwhile La Fontaine, in 1669, published a fine romance of Psyche, partly in verse, and Fenelon, in 1699, his cele brated Telemaque. The influence of La Bruyere on the novelists, although he wrote no novels, must not be overlooked. But the Princesse de Cleves remained the solitary novel of moral analysis when its author died and the 17th century closed. The successes of Lesage seemed to be wholly reactionary. His realistic novels, Gil Blas and Le Diable boiteux, depended upon their comic force, their picaresque vivacity, rather than upon the sober study of av erage human character. But Marivaux (1688-1763) took up the psychological novel again, and produced in Marianne (1731) and Le Paysan parvenu (1735) analytical stories of Parisian manners and character which were wholly modern in form. If Marianne was deliberate, the exquisite Manon Lescaut (1731), by the Abbe Prevost d'Exiles (1697-1763), was almost an accident; but, be tween them, these simultaneous works started the French novel of the analysis of emotion. The brilliant stories of Voltaire, which began with Zadig and included Candide, hardly belonged to this category; they are rather satires and diversions, in which class must also be placed the fashionable boudoir novels of Crebillon fa/s, La Morliere and others. But the English taste, exemplified mainly by Richardson, Sterne and Fielding, prevailed, and its effect was seen again in the imperfect novels of Diderot and Rousseau. The Nouvelle Heloise and the Emile of the latter are not skilfully constructed as stories, but they mark the starting point of the novel which aims at familiarizing the public mind with great ideas in an attractively romantic form. The moral purpose is equally evident in the famous Paul et Virginie of Ber nardin de St. Pierre. It was less didactically present in Mme. de Stael's Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807), where the misinter preted woman of genius, so often depicted since, is first introduced to French novel-readers. It was not, however, until about 183o that the novel began to be one of the main channels of imaginative writing in France, and the development of this kind of fiction was one of the main features of the romantic revival. Stendhal showed that, without any of the charms of style, and relying exclusively upon minute psychological observation, the record of a human life could be made enthrallingly interesting. Alexandre Dumas, under the direct influence of Sir Walter Scott, allowed his tropic imagination to revel and riot in brilliant chains of adventure. The imaginative novel was admirably conceived by George Sand. But it was Balzac who filled canvas after canvas with the astounding intensity of life itself, and who insisted with irresistible force that the function of the novel is to draw a con sistent and unprejudiced picture of humanity under the strain of a succession of probable passions. This has been clearly compre hended by a host of later French novelists, whose record cannot be traced here, to be the function of the novel, as Mme. de La Fayette invented it, as Marivaux and Prevost developed it, and as George Sand and Balzac finally laid down its laws and settled its borders. Certain dates, however, must be recorded in the briefest record of the evolution of the French novel, and 1856 is one of these; in that year Gustave Flaubert published Madame Bovary, a work in which the rival realistic and romantic tendencies are combined with a mastery that had not been approached and has not since been equalled. Another is 1871, when Zola began to roll out the enormous canvas of Les Rougon-Macquart. Yet another is 188o, when Boule de suif first revealed in Maupassant a novelist whose creations were not merely amusing and striking, but abso lutely convincing and logical.
England.—If we take no heed of translations of Latin stories, such as those from the Gesta Romanorum, we may say that the beginning of prose fiction in England is Le Morte d'Arthur, of Sir Thomas Malory, finished in or about 147o, and printed by Caxton in 1485. The great merits of this writer were that he got rid of the mediaeval burden of allegory, essayed an interpretation of the human heart, and invented a lucid and vigorous style of narra tive. But his book became, as Prof. W. Raleigh has said, "the
feeder of poetry rather than of prose," and it gave no inkling of the methods of the modern novel., The same may be said of such versions of the Charlemagne, Amadis and Palmeria cycles of romances as Huon of Bordeaux, published by Lord Berners, per haps in 1535, and innumerable others. It was the novella of Italy from which the English novel first faintly started. Between 156o and 158o versions of the Italian novelists became exceedingly popular in England. Paynter in introducing the tales of Bandello and Straparola struck the true novelist's note by offering them not as works of morality or edification, but "instead of a merry com panion to shorten the tedious toil of weary ways." The apprecia tion of these Italian stories led to the composition of the Euphues of Lyly (1579), a book of great interest and merit, which has been called "the first original prose novel written in English." This is somewhat to exaggerate, since Euphues is rather a work of elegant philosophy than a narrative. Lyly had many imitators, Munday, Greene, Dickenson, Barnabe Rich, Lodge, Nash and others, who formed a school of prose fiction which was not without a certain romantic beauty, but possessed as little narrative vigour as pos sible. To compare a story written by Sacchetti in 1385 with one written by Greene in 1585 is to perceive that not merely had no progress been made towards the modern novel, but that a great deal of ground had been lost. The absence of the comic element in Elizabethan romances is very marked. M. Jusserand has claimed a peculiar merit in this and other respects for the Jack Wilton of Nash (1594), which, as he points out, is the earliest English example of picaresque literature. During the reign of the heroic romances in France, their vogue violently affected the English book-market. The huge stories of Calprenede (especially Cassandre) and Gomberville were translated and imitated to the exclusion of every other species of prose fiction, between 1645 and 167o. The long-winded books of Mlle. de Scudery. especially The Great Cyrus, were read so universally in England as to leave their stamp on the national manners. Of original English romances writ ten in competition with the French masterpieces of chivalry, the Parthenissa of Lord Orrery (1654) is the best known. The first definite stand against these Gallicized romances was made by two dramatists, Aphra Behn and William Congreve. Congreve's Incog nita (1692) is remarkable for its light raillery and humour, and perhaps deserves as well as any 17th century composition to be called the earliest novel in English. The stories of Mrs. Behn have the merit of a romantic simplicity in narrative, but they are dull. It was Daniel Defoe who introduced a minute and rude system of realistic observation which exactitude he combined with a survival of the old picaresque method, the result being those entertaining works Colonel Jack (1722) and Roxana (1724). He came to positive success in the immortal narrative of Robinson Crusoe.