Anything like a detailed criticism or even a bare narrative of this voluminous literature is plainly impossible without the limits of a single chapter.  Readers must go for it to books on the subject.  It is possible here merely to draw attention to those authors to whom the English novel as a more or less fixed form is indebted for its peculiar characteristics.  Foremost amongst these are Richardson and Fielding; after them there is Walter Scott.  After him, in the nineteenth century, Dickens and Meredith and Mr. Hardy; last of all the French realists and the new school of romance.  To one or other of these originals all the great authors in the long list of English novelists owe their method and their choice of subject-matter.

With Defoe fiction gained verisimilitude, it ceased to deal with the incredible; it aimed at exhibiting, though in strange and memorable circumstances, the workings of the ordinary mind.  It is Richardson’s main claim to fame that he contrived a form of novel which exhibited an ordinary mind working in normal circumstances, and that he did this with a minuteness which till then had never been thought of and has not since been surpassed.  His talent is very exactly a microscopical talent; under it the common stuff of life separated from its surroundings and magnified beyond previous knowledge, yields strange and new and deeply interesting sights.  He carried into the study of character which had begun in Addison with an eye to externals and eccentricities, a minute faculty of inspection which watched and recorded unconscious mental and emotional processes.

To do this he employed a method which was, in effect, a compromise between that of the autobiography, and that of the tale told by an invisible narrator.  The weakness of the autobiography is that it can write only of events within the knowledge of the supposed speaker, and that consequently the presentation of all but one of the characters of the book is an external presentation.  We know, that is, of Man Friday only what Crusoe could, according to realistic appropriateness, tell us about him.  We do not know what he thought or felt within himself.  On the other hand the method of invisible narration had not at his time acquired the faculty which it possesses now of doing Friday’s thinking aloud or exposing fully the workings of his mind.  So that Richardson, whose interests were psychological, whose strength and talent lay in the presentation of the states of mind appropriate to situations of passion or intrigue, had to look about him for a new form, and that form he found in the novel of letters.  In a way, if the end of a novel be the presentation not of action, but of the springs of action; if the external event is in it always of less importance than the emotions which conditioned it, and the emotions which it set working, the novel of letters is the supreme manner for fiction.  Consider the possibilities of it; there is a series of events in which A, B, and C are concerned.