A history of English literature

by Edward Albert

Sheridan was an Irishman, and became a prominent wit and politician. His wit is admirably revealed in his three brilliant prose comedies. The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The Critic (1779). The three all resemble the best of the Restoration comedies, without the immorality that taints their models. The plots are ingenious and effective, though they depend largely on a stagy complexity of intrigue; the characters, among whom are the immortal figures of Mrs. Malaprop, Bob Acres, and Sir Fretful Plagiary, are stage types, but they are struck off with daring skill; and the dialogue is often a succession of brilliant repartees. The worst that can be said against the plays is that they are artificial, and that the very cleverness of them becomes fatiguing. With the work of Sheridan the artificial comedy reaches its climax.

3. Prose. The prose product of the period is bulky, varied, and of great importance. The importance of it is clear enough when we recollect that it includes, among many other things, possibly the best novel in the language (Tom Jones), the best history (The Decline and Fall), and the best biography (The Life of Doctor Johnson).

(a) The Rise of the Novel. There are two main classes of fictional prose narratives, namely, the tale or romance and the novel. The distinction between the two need not be drawn too fine, for there is a large amount of prose narrative that can fall into either group; but, broadly speaking, we may say that the tale or romance depends for its chief interest on incident and adventure, whereas the novel depends more on the display of character and motive. In addition, the story (or plot, or fable) of the novel tends to be more complicated than that of the tale, and it often leads to what were called by the older writers “revolutions and discoveries”—that is, unexpected developments in the narrative, finishing with an explanation that is called the dénouement. The tale, moreover, can be separated from the romance: the plot of the tale is commonly matter-of-fact, while that of the romance is often wonderful and fantastic.

There is little doubt that the modern novel has its roots in the medieval romances, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and those dealing with the legends of King Arthur. Another source of the novel were the collections of ballads telling of the adventures of popular heroes of the type of Robin Hood. These romances were written in verse; they were supplied with stock characters, like the wandering knight, the distressed damsel, and the wicked wizard; they had stock incidents, connected with enchanted castles, fiery dragons, and perilous ambushes; and their story rambled on almost interminably. They were necessary to satisfy the human craving for fiction, and they were often fiction of a picturesque and lively kind.

The age of Elizabeth saw the rise of the prose romance. We have examples in the Euphues (1579) of Lyly and the Arcadia of Sidney. As fiction these tales are weighed down with their fantastic prose styles, and with their common desire to expound a moral lesson. Their characters are rudimentary, and there is little attempt at a plot and love-theme. Yet they represent an advance, for they are fiction.

They are interesting from another viewpoint. They show us that curious diffidence that was to be a drag on the production of the novel even as late as the time of Scott. Authors were shy of being novelists for two main reasons: first, there was thought to be something almost immoral in the writing of fiction, as it was but the glorification of a pack of lies; and, secondly, the liking for fiction was considered to be the craving of diseased or immature intellects, and so the production of it was unworthy of reasonable men. Thus if a man felt impelled to write fiction he had to conceal the narrative with some moral or allegorical dressing.

A new type of embryo novel began to appear at the end of the sixteenth century, and, becoming very popular during the seventeenth, retained its popularity till the days of Fielding and Smollett.

This class is known as the picaresque novel, a name derived from the Spanish word picaron, which means a wandering rogue. As the name implies, it is of Spanish origin. For hero it takes a rascal who leads a wandering life, and has many adventures, most of them of a scandalous kind. The hero is the sole link between the different incidents, and there is much digression and the interposing of other short narratives. In Spain the picaresque type originated in parodies of the old romances, and of such parodies the greatest is the Don Quixote (1604) of Cervantes. In France the type became common, the most famous example of it being the Gil Blas (1735) of Le Sage.

In England the picaresque novel had an early start in Jack Wilton, or The Unfortunate Traveller, by Nash, (1567–1601), whose work often suggests that of Defoe. Nash’s work is crude, but it has vigor and some wit. A later effort in the same kind is The English Rogue (1665), by Richard Head. The book is gross and scandalous to an extreme degree, but it has energy, and, as it takes the hero to many places on the globe, the reader obtains interesting glimpses of life in foreign parts.

Another type that came into favor was the heroic romance. This was based on the similar French romances of Mademoiselle Scudéri (1607–1701) and others. This class of fiction was the elegant variety of the grosser picaresque novel, and it was much duller. The hero of a heroic romance was usually of high degree, and he underwent a long series of romantic adventures, many of them supernatural. There was much love-making, involving long speeches containing “noble sentiments, elegantly expressed.” The length of these romances was enormous; the Grand Cyrus of Mademoiselle Scudéri ran to ten large volumes. Popular English specimens were Ford’s Parismus, Prince of Bohemia (1598) and Parthenissa (1654), by Roger Boyle. It is worth noting that the artificial heroic romance collapsed about the end of the seventeenth century, whereas the picaresque class, which in spite of its grave faults was a human and interesting type of fiction, survived and influenced the novel in later centuries.