escape us, owing to the very hurry and stir of
life, an attitude we express by saying that for a novel to be
recognized as such, it must offer an historical or documentary
value, a value precise and determined, particular and local, and
as well, a general and lasting psychologic value or
significance."

It may be added, that while in the middle eighteenth century the
novel-writing was tentative and hardly more than an avocation,
at the end of the nineteenth, it had become a fine art and a
profession. It did not occur to Richardson, serious-minded man
that he was, that he was formulating a new art canon for
fiction. Indeed, the English author takes himself less and less
seriously as we go back in time. It was bad form to be literary
when Voltaire visited Congreve and found a fine gentleman where
he sought a writer of genius: complaining therefore that fine
gentlemen came cheap in Paris; what he wished to see was the
creator of the great comedies. In the same fashion, we find
Horace Walpole, who dabbled in letters all his days and made it
really his chief interest, systematically underrating the
professional writers of his day, to laud a brilliant amateur who
like himself desired the plaudits of the game without obeying
its exact rules. He looked askance at the fiction-makers
Richardson and Fielding, because they did not move in the polite
circles frequented by himself.

The same key is struck by lively Fanny Burney in reporting a
meeting with a languishing lady of fashion who had perpetrated a
piece of fiction with the alarming title of "The Mausoleum of
Julia": "My sister intends, said Lady Say and Sele, to print her
Mausoleum, just for her own friends and acquaintances."

"Yes? said Lady Hawke, I have never printed yet."

And a little later, the same spirit is exhibited by Jane Austen
when Madame de Sevigne sought her: Miss Austen suppressed the
story-maker, wishing to be taken first of all for what she was:
a country gentlewoman of unexceptionable connections. Even
Walter Scott and Byron plainly exhibit this dislike to be
reckoned as paid writers, men whose support came by the pen. In
short, literary professionalism reflected on gentility. We have
changed all that with a vengeance and can hardly understand the
earlier sentiment; but this change of attitude has carried with
it inevitably the artistic advancement of modern fiction. For if
anything is certain it is that only professional skill can be
relied upon