information; but these are side issues. The plain and direct
purpose of the novel 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. The novel requires, from those who are content to be only fairly proficient in it, less intellectual apparatus than any other species ef writing. This does not militate against the fact that the greatest novelists, always a small class, produce work which is as admirable in its art as the finest poetry. But the novel adapts itself to so large a range of readers, and covers so vast a ground in the imitation of life, that it is the unique branch of literature which may be cultivated without any real distinction or skill, and yet for the moment may exercise a powerful purpose.
2. Classical Antiquity.—The place held by the novel in antiquity offers interesting analogies with its position in modern times. It was Voltaire, in his Pyrrhonisme de l’histoire, who set the fashion of calling the Cyropaedeia a novel, but it is probable that Xenophon, in composing this great work on the education of Cyrus, 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 History are fantastic and extraordinary fictions in which the nature of the novel is not unfrequently approached. But a Syrian Christian, 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 (Λόγγος), but of whose life nothing is known, wrote the voluptuous pastoral story of Daphnis and Chloë, which is far superior to all other remnants of Greek fiction which have come down to us, and which 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, It is probable that in the great age of Roman literature prose fiction was cultivated, but we should be limited to pure conjecture as to its scope, if we did not possess a fragment of a work which is absolutely invaluable to the comparative student of literature. If the Satyricon 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 produce 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 a 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 Hermas, and the productions of Palladius and of Synesius, indistinctly testified to a certain appetite for prose fiction.
3. Italian.—It was in northern Italy that the novel of modern Europe (both the literary type and the name) came into existence. A collection of tales, called Il Novellino or Cento novelle antiche (although only 66 of the 100 survive), was composed at the end of the 13th century, and started this class of literature in Europe. These anonymous stories are of extraordinary diversity, chivalrous, mythological, moral and scandalous. The medieval view of women and priests and peasants is found in its full development, and there is something of the realistic reflection of customs which was to flourish later in a whole class of fiction. The earliest Italian novelist whose name is connected with his writings is Francesco da Barberino (1264–1348), whose Documenti d’Amor were first published in 1640. He was followed by the celebrated Giovanni Boccaccio, who wrote his Filocopo about 1339 and the Decameron some nine years later. Of his disciples the most eminent was Francesco Sacchetti (1335–1400), a Florentine. Sacchetti’s Trecente novelle, which remained in MS. until the 18th century (1724), are ironical and realistic studies of the life around him in Tuscany. To Giovanni Fiorentino is attributed a collection of 50 tales, called Il Pecorone, printed first in 1558, but written in 1378. Shakespeare was indebted to one of these stories for the plot of The Merchant of Venice. A great name in the evolution of European fiction is that of Tommaso Guardato, called Masuccio (1415?–1477?); he was a native of Salerno, and was the first of the south Italian novelists. 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?–1477?), 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 preserved, but these are of unusual merit. We then reach Matteo Bandello (1480–1561), 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 the 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 unbounded popularity. Manzoni had a troop of imitators, but no rivals. In the fourth quarter of the 19th century Italy produced some very brilliant and original novelists, in particular Giovanni Verga (b. 1840), Matilda Serao (b. 1856) and Gabriele d’Annunzio (b. 1865).
4. France.—In the 14th century, when Italy was already proceeding in a modern direction, France was satisfied with ancient tales of Fierabras or Les Quatre fils d’Aynon, which were nothing but epics told in rambling prose. 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 nouvelles, imitated from Boccaccio and Sacchetti. This bud of realistic 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 Gaule enjoyed at this time an extraordinary popularity.
The habit of telling tales freely in prose was not, however, formed in France until after 1500. Bonaventure Despériers (d. 1544) was the author of the Cymbalum mundi, and of Nouvelles récréations, mordant satires and gay stories. Probably to this age also belongs the semi-fabulous Béroalde de Verville, who is supposed to be the author of a collection of facetious
