This, as has been said, is the mystery of fiction—­a mystery partly set a-working in the mediaeval romance, then mostly lost, and now recovered—­in his own way and according to his own capacity—­by Defoe.  It was to escape others for a little longer and then to be yet again rediscovered by the great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century—­to slip in and out of hands during the later part of that century, and then to be all but finally established, in patterns for everlasting pursuance, by Miss Austen and by Scott.  But Defoe is really (unless we put Bunyan before him) the first of the magicians—­not the greatest by any means, but great and almost alone in the peculiar talent of making uninteresting things interesting—­not by burlesquing them or satirising them; not by suffusing or inflaming them with passion; not by giving them the amber of style; but by serving them “simple of themselves” as though they actually existed.

The position of Defoe in novel history is so great that there is a temptation to end this chapter with him.  But to do so would cause an inconvenience greater than any resulting advantages.  For the greatest of Defoe’s contemporaries in English letters also comes into our division, and comes best here.  One cannot conveniently rank Swift with the great quartette of the next chapter, because he is a novelist “by interim” and incompletely:  to rank him among the minor and later novelists of the eighteenth century would be as to the first part of the classification absurd and as to the last false.  And he comes, not merely in time, pretty close to Defoe, incommensurable as is the genius of the two.  It has even been thought (plausibly enough, though the matter is of no great importance) that the form of Gulliver may have been to some extent determined by Robinson Crusoe and Defoe’s other novels of travel.  And there is a subtler reason for taking the pair together and both close to Addison and Steele.

Swift had shown the general set towards prose fiction, and his own bent in the same direction, long before Defoe’s novel-period and as early as the Tale of a Tub and the Battle of the Books (published 1704 but certainly earlier in part).  The easy flow of the narrative, and the vivid dialogue of the Spider and the Bee in the latter, rank high among those premonitions of novel with which, in this place, we should be specially busied.  In the former Peter, Martin, and Jack want but a little more of the alchemist’s furnace to accomplish their projection into real characters, and not merely allegorical figure-heads.  But, of course, in both books, the satiric purpose dominates too much to allow them to be really ranked among novels, even if they had taken the trouble to clothe themselves with more of the novel-garb.