NOVELS AND ROMANCES OF TILE 18TH CENTURY.—The two European nations that most brilliantly distinguished themselves in the department of fiction during this century were England and France, and to these we shall chiefly confine our attention.
1. English Prose 1"iction.—During the age of Elizabeth and her immediate successors, the imaginative genius of England, from various causes, had taken an almost exclu sively poetical direction, and with the exception of Sidney's pastoral of Arcadia, and Bunyau's Pilgrim's Progress, we meet with nothing in the shape of a novel cr a romance tor a hundred years. The 17th c. hat nothing to show till it approaches its close. This is doubtless owing, in part at least, to the intensity of the great political struggle that agitated and rent England during the first half of that century, and gave an austere theological bias to society. The Puritans, in their day of triumph, would not tolerate either comic or heroic romances. They set their faces "like flint" against all imagina tive fiction, which they considered as little better than lying; and even to this day that class of people commonly described as " the religious portion of the community," in some sense the representatives of the Puritans, betray the legitimacy of their spiritual descent by their aversion to all sorts of sectilar tales. After the restoration, however, an extraordinary change came over the English nation, or at least over the upper and wealthier classes. These rioted in the excess of a coarse and licentious reaction against the rigorous piety and fanaticism of the commonwealth. turbid viciousness by and by calmed down, but it left a certain taint of sensualism and materialism in the hab its and life of the people, which, in the opinion of some competent critics, marks them to this day. It is certain that at the beginning of the 18th c. England was entering on ' the most prosaic, unimaginative, and unheroical period of her history\ Its characteris tics are faithfully reflected in most of her novels, which, as pictures of the gross dull life, the paltry thoughts, the low sentiments, the modish manners, and the loose morality that prevailed, possess a great historical value apart altogether from their literary merits. The first name that occurs is that of the notorious Aph•a Behn (q.v.), the greater num ber of whose novels, of which Oronoko is the best known, appeared towards the close of the reign of Charles II., but are included here in the literature of the 18th c., as they belong to it by the nature of their contents, and not to the 17th c. types of fiction. She was imitated by Mrs. Heywood (horn 1696, died 17;58), of whose Lore in Excess, The British Recluse, and The Injured husband, it has been remarked that " the male characters are in the highest degree licentious, and the females as impassioned as the Sa!acen princesses in the Spanish romances of chivalry." A later work, however, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, is of a higher stamp, and is supposed to have suggested the plan of Miss Burney's Ecelina. But the first novelist of great genius belonging to the new era is Daniel De Foe (q.v.), the father of modern English prose fiction, in whose writings— The Adventures of Captain Singleton, The Fortunes of Moll l'ianders, The History of Colonel Jack., etc.—the coarse, homely, unpoetical, but vigorous realism of the time is strikingly apparent. Perhaps the Spanish ragamuffin romances may have furnished him with some hints. Robinson erUS0a is the finest and the most famous of all that class
of fiction which was extensively cultivated both in France and England dUring the earlier part of the 18th c., and which received, in the. former country, the name of Voy , ages Imagimaires. To the same class (outwardly at least) belong Swift's Gulliver's Thz eels, though at bottom this is a satirical romance, like the works of Rabelais, and the Gaudentio di.Lucca, a sort of politico-geographical fiction, generally attributed to Bishop so Berkeley. After De Foe comes Richardn (q.v.), very unlike any of the novelists of his. age—to appearance! His muse is a most decorous prude, and never 'utters anythidt rude, or vulgar, or licentious; but though she was inspired with the best intentions LIV6i. notions of how virtue should be rewarded indicate the coarseness of the time, hardlpbts than the debaucheries and seductions of Fielding and Smollett. The principal nqi dRif Richardson arc, Pamela; Sir Charles Grandison; and Clarissa Harlowe. thought Richardson untrue to nature, and wrote his first novel of Joseph Antt e a burlesque on the style of his predecessor. Like his subsequent and Amelia, it represents society as Fielding's sharper eyes saw it, on the'whAato2si, vulgar, and impure. Smollett (q.v.), with a different style of genius, in the same spirit. His chief works are, Roderick Random; Peregrine 01Y .044,-: AdOrtt tures of Ferdinand Count Fathom; Humphry Clinker. Sterne t p the same period, exhibits a genius so whimsical, peculiar, and V impossible to class him with any of his contemporaries. His TriktMeVeiiikifirax4i'k' sui genesis, but nowhere is the coarse impurity and indelicacycrE'iliet,`Trit'e ens. Four years later appeared Goldsmitlys Vicar of 101ViiVaiike for the better, in a moral point of view, is first noticeable. 'eltfonW Richard son, all the novelists above mentioned are usually, and we may add correctly, described as humorists. Other qualities they have besides, but this is the most common and pre dominant. When this school was passing away about 1760-70, another was on the eve of being born. The publication of Percy's Religues had reawakened an interest in the age of chivalry and romance. Readers lied become tired of the long prevalence of prosaic fiction, in spite of the splendid genius devoted to its illustration. It had done its work, and could create no more. The first of the modern romantic school was Horne Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto appeared in 1709. It was followed by Clara Reeve, the authoress of the Old English Baron, a romance that every school-boy, we hope, remembers with the deepest gratitude; but the greatest genius in this line was undoubt edly Mrs. Radcliffe (q.v.), whose Mysteries of Udolpiw and other works, though now almost forgotten, were once greedily devoured and abundantly imitated. The ablest of her successors were Matthew Gregory Lewis, author of The Monk (1796), and Maturin, author of Montorlo (1803). .In all the romances of this school, the incidents are of the most startling, terrible, and often supernatural character, and the scenery is in keeping. with the incidents. Fierce barons, mysterious bandits, persecuted maidens, gloomy castles, secret passages, deep forests, murders, ghosts, haunted chambers, etc.; every thing that could charm, by way of contrast, and pleasantly horrify the languid, matter-of fact, skeptical 18th c., is to be found in their exaggerated pages.