form of fiction in its highest art is the creation of Defoe.  He told stories of adventure, incidents modelled on real life as many tellers of tales had done before him, but to the form as he found it he super-added a psychological interest—­the interest of the character of the narrator.  He contrived to observe in his writing a scrupulous and realistic fidelity and appropriateness to the conditions in which the story was to be told.  We learn about Crusoe’s island, for instance, gradually just as Crusoe learns of it himself, though the author is careful by taking his narrator up to a high point of vantage the day after his arrival, that we shall learn the essentials of it, as long as verisimilitude is not sacrificed, as soon as possible.  It is the paradox of the English novel that these our earliest efforts in fiction were meant, unlike the romances which preceded them, to pass for truth.  Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year was widely taken as literal fact, and it is still quoted as such occasionally by rash though reputable historians.  So that in England the novel began with realism as it has culminated, and across two centuries Defoe and the “naturalists” join hands.  Defoe, it is proper also in this place to notice, fixed the peculiar form of the historical novel.  In his Memoirs of a Cavalier, the narrative of an imaginary person’s adventures in a historical setting is interspersed with the entrance of actual historical personages, exactly the method of historical romancing which was brought to perfection by Sir Walter Scott.

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In the eighteenth century came the decline of the drama for which the novel had been waiting.  By 1660 the romantic drama of Elizabeth’s time was dead; the comedy of the Restoration which followed, witty and brilliant though it was, reflected a society too licentious and artificial to secure it permanence; by the time of Addison play-writing had fallen to journey-work, and the theatre to openly expressed contempt.  When Richardson and Fielding published their novels there was nothing to compete with fiction in the popular taste.  It would seem as though the novel had been waiting for this favourable circumstance.  In a sudden burst of prolific inventiveness, which can be paralleled in all letters only by the period of Marlowe and Shakespeare, masterpiece after masterpiece poured from the press.  Within two generations, besides Richardson and Fielding came Sterne and Goldsmith and Smollett and Fanny Burney in naturalism, and Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe in the new way of romance.  Novels by minor authors were published in thousands as well.  The novel, in fact, besides being the occasion of literature of the highest class, attracted by its lucrativeness that under-current of journey-work authorship which had hitherto busied itself in poetry or plays.  Fiction has been its chief occupation ever since.