MODERN TIMES. 1-RUM CAXTON TO PacuAnnsoN IA ENGLAND. The invention of printing (fifteenth century) meant. the end of the verse tale except as a survival. Of course. the transition from verse to prose was not sudden. A prose style suit able to orderly narrative had to he created, and the audience of the minstrel had to be taught to read. Both processes were slow. The first school masters and the founders of English prose were Caxton and the learned printers who followed him. The first hoof: printed in the English language was a collection of stories in which the divinities of ancient Greece are transformed into the lords and ladies of feudal society. It is known as the Recuoell of the Histories of Troy, and was printed V Caxton, probably in 1474, at the press of in Bruges. After Caxton had set up his own press in Westminster, he issued many romances, which were commonly prose expansions of medimval tales and legends. Most significant of all is the Norte d'Arthur (14S5), compiled from various sources by Sir Thomas Malory in 1469-70. The result was not a well-constructed romance: the matter was too heterogeneous for that. But it was a fiction "pleasant to read" and "written for our doc trine." of especial interest, too, are Regnant tlo Fox Ills!), the Four Sons of _lymon (1489), and and Eglantine (14S9). The great labors of Caxton in translating• editing, and printing were continued by his noble follow ers in the sixteenth century. Perhat?s the finest work done by or for them was Iluon of Burdeux, a half-laity tale translated by Lord Berners out of the French. To this time belongs also the t told(' (e.1515), by Sir Thomas More. A full list of the romances issued by the English press before would be a revelation as to the spread of the taste for reading marvelous tales.
But the redactors employed by the printers in compiling bulky volumes lost sight of plot. The d'Arthur is a series of biographies loosely connected with the career of king Arthur. Be fore there could he a novel• chaos hail to be reduced to order. That. service was performed after a fashion by Spain. Amadis of Gaul (.1.v.), with its typical Greek story of the
separation and the final union of the hero and heroine. thus becomes the first prose romance of chivalry. The pastoral, partly in verse and partly in prose, which had assumed a tenuous form in the Italian Aracadia (1504), by .Jacopo Sannazaro, was developed by the Spaniard Mon temayor in his Diana (1560). Still further, an unknimn Spaniard transformed the tricks of mediaeval tales into the short novel of manners. A merry scamp is put behind the scenes and per witicd relate what he sees there. The earliest of these so-called picaresque, or rogue, stories is Litz/trill° do Tunings (1554). It was followed by a host of others7, front which we rightly date the beginnings of the modern realistic novel. But the glory of Spain is Don Quixote (q.v.). To out ward appi.arances merely a burlesque of the ro mani•t': of chivalry. it also eontains a careful delineation of manners and two charaeter-tyiws —Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—who, as has been said again and again. are a summary of human nature.
To the Elizabethans. everything of importance that had been done in fiction abroad was well known. And yet in this age of the drama there was no very marked advance in the art of fiction. Sidney's Arcadia (1590) is an attempt to unite the pastoral and the romance of chivalry. and to give them the structure of the ./://tiorien of lleliodorus. The pastoral as written by Greene, Lodge. and many others, was the old romance of adventure reduced to prose and put in a new• setting. What its possibilities were, had it been cultivated by a great literary artist. we may imagine from Shakespeare's .18 You Like It, "" llosaiande. The most popular Elizabethan fiction was Lyly's L'aphues (1579), n romance of high life. For the enchantments of the romance of chivalry, Lyly substituted a wondrous natural history, which he derived from bea•tbooks or made up as he went along. As it realist great powers were displayed by Thomas Nash in his ill-constructed Unfortunate Trar,ller, or .1aek Wilton (1591). Indeed, Nash anticipates the manner of Defoe.