. And the
same acute critic, in his "History of Classical French Literature,"
pointed out that French novels were under a cloud of suspicion even so
far back as the days of Erasmus, in 1525. It was many scores of years
thereafter before the self-appointed guardians of French literature
esteemed the novel highly enough to condescend to discuss it.

Perhaps this was not altogether a disadvantage. French tragedy was
discussed only too abundantly; and the theorists laid down rules for
it which were not a little cramping. Another French critic, M. Le
Breton, in his account of the growth of French prose-fiction in the
first half of the nineteenth century, has asserted that this exemption
from criticism really redounded to the benefit of the novel, since the
despised form was allowed to develop naturally, spontaneously, free
from all the many artificial restrictions which the dogmatists
succeeded in imposing on tragedy and on comedy, and which resulted at
last in the sterility of the French drama toward the end of the
eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. While this
advantage is undeniable, one may question whether it was not bought at
too great a price and whether there would not have been a certain
profit for prose-fiction if its practitioners had been kept up to the
mark by a criticism which educated the public to demand greater care
in structure, more logic in the conduct of events, and stricter
veracity in the treatment of characters.

However much it might then be deemed unworthy of serious consideration,
the novel in the eighteenth century began to attract to itself more and
more authors of rich natural endowment. In English literature especially,
prose-fiction tempted men as unlike as Defoe and Swift, Richardson and
Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, Goldsmith and Johnson. And a little
earlier the eighteenth century essayists, with Steele and Addison at the
head of them, had developed the art of character-delineation, a
development out of which the novelists were to make their profit. The
influence of the English eighteenth-century essay on the growth of
prose-fiction, not only in the British Isles, but also on the continent
of Europe, is larger than is generally admitted. Indeed, there is a
sense in which the successive papers depicting the character and the
deeds of Sir Roger de Coverley may be accepted as the earliest of serial
stories.

But it was only in the nineteenth century that the novel reach