about it" and more actual conversation; a stronger
projection of character and other things; is merely to say that it is an
experiment in the infancy of the novel, not a following out of secrets
already divulged. It certainly is the first prose story in English which
can be ranked with things that already existed in foreign literatures.
Nor is it the only one of the batch in which advance is seen. "The King
of Bantam," for instance, is the account of an "extravagant," though not
quite a fool, who is "coney-catched" in the old manner. But it opens in
a fashion very different indeed from the old manner. "This money is
certainly a most devilish thing! I'm sure the want of it had been like
to ruin my dear Philibella!" and the succeeding adventures are pretty
freshly told. The trick of headlong overture was a favourite with Afra.
"The Adventure of the Black Lady" begins, "About the beginning of last
June, as near as I can remember, Bellamira came to town from Hampshire."
It is a trick of course: and here probably borrowed from the French: but
the line which separates trick from artistic device is an exceedingly
narrow and winding one. At any rate, this plunging into the middle of
things wakes up the reader's attention, and does not permit him to doze.
"The Lucky Mistake," on the other hand, opens with a little landscape,
"The river Loire has on its delightful banks, etc." "The Fair Jilt," a
Bandello-like story, begins with an exaltation of Love: and so on. Now
these things, though they may seem matters of course to the mere modern
reader, were not matters of course then. Afra very likely imitated; her
works have never been critically edited; and have not served as field
for much origin-hunting. But whether she followed others or not, she led
her own division. All these things and others are signs of an awakened
conscience--of a sense of the fact that fiction, to be literature, must
be something more than the relation of a bare fact, tragic, comic, or
neutral--that the novelist is a cook, and must prepare and serve his
materials with a sauce as much his own as possible, of plot,
arrangement, character-drawing, scenery, conversation, reflection, and
what not. That conversation itself--the subtlest instrument of all and
the most effective for constructing character--is so little developed,
can only, I think, be accounted for by supposing Afra and others to be
under the not unnatural mistake that conversation especially belonged to