anecdotes and conversations, Le Moyen de Parvenir. These,
and other experiments in fiction, lead us up to Rabelais, whose
magnificent genius adopted as its mode of address the chain of
burlesque prose narratives which we possess in Gargantua and
Pantagruel, recording the family history of a race of giant kings,
but his influence on the novel is insignificant. It was half a
century later that, in the romantic pastoral of Astrée, published
in 1610, France may be said to have achieved her first attempt
at a novel. This famous book was written by Honoré d’Urfé;
in spite of its absurdities it is full of talent, and succeeds, for
the first time in the history of French narrative, in depicting
individual character. D’Urfé was followed, with less originality,
by Marin Le Roy de Gomberville (1600–1674), who was the author
of a Mexican romance, Polexandre, and by Gombauld (1570?–1666),
the author of Endymion (1624). These were fictions of
interminable adventures, 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 Madame de Sévigné. To Gomberville,
who has been called the Alexandre Dumas of the 17th century,
succeeded Mdlle de Scudéry (1607–1701), who preserved the
romantic framework of the novel, but filled it up with modern
and familiar figures disguised under ancient names. Her huge
romans à clef, tiresome as they are, form the necessary steppingstone
between Astrée, in which the novel was first conceived,
and La Princesse de Clèves, where at last it found perfect
expression. Meanwhile, the elephantine heroic romances 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 Scudéry were
the Roman comique (1651) of Scarron and Le Roman bourgeois
(1666) of Furetière.
All these, however, were mere preparations. The earliest novelist of France is Marguerite de la Vergne, comtesse de La Fayette (1634–1693), and the earliest genuine French novels were her Princesse de Montpensier (1662), and her far more important Princesse de Clèves (1678). Madame 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 1670, a Zayde, which is in the Spanish manner affected by Mdlle de Scudéry. It was long before the peculiar originality of the Princesse de Clèves was appreciated. Meanwhile La Fontaine, in 1669, published a fine romance of Psyché, partly in verse, and Fénelon, in 1699, his celebrated Télémaque. The influence of La Bruyère on the novelists, although he wrote no novels, must not be overlooked. But the Princesse de Clèves remained the solitary novel of moral analysis when its author died and the 17th century closed. The successes of Alain René Lesage seemed to be wholly reactionary. His realistic novels, Gil Blas and Le Diable boileux, depended upon their comic force, their picaresque vivacity, rather than upon the sober study of average 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 Abbé Prévost d’Exiles (1697–1763), was almost an accident; but, between 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 Crébillon fils, La Morlière 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 Héloïse and the Émile of the latter are not skilfully constructed as stories. but they mark the starting-point of the novel which aims at familiarising the public mind with great ideas in an attractively romantic form. The moral purpose is equally evident in the famous Paul et Virginie of Bernardin de St Pierre. It was less didactically present in Mme de Stael’s Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807), where the misinterpreted woman of genius, so often depicted since, is first introduced to French novel-readers. It was not, however, until about 1830 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 consistent and unprejudiced picture of humanity under the strain of a succession of probable passions; This has been clearly comprehended by the 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 Prévost 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 in 1880, when Boule de suif first revealed in Maupassant a novelist whose creations were not merely amusing and striking, but absolutely convincing and logical.
5. English.—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 1470, and printed by Caxton in 1485. The great merits of this writer were that he got rid of the medieval burden of allegory, essayed an interpretation of the human heart, and invented a lucid and vigorous style of narrative. But his book became, as Professor 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, perhaps in 1535, and innumerable others. It was the novella of Italy from which the English novel first faintly started. Between 1560 and 1580 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 companion to shorten the tedious toil of weary ways.” The appreciation 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 which possessed as little narrative vigour as possible. 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 genius of the Elizabethan age lay in the direction of lyrical and dramatic poetry, not of prose fiction. 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
