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 reached its
full expansion and succeeded in winning recognition as the heir of the
epic and the rival of the drama. This victory was the direct result of
the overwhelming success of the Waverley novels and of the countless
stories written more or less in accordance with Scott's formula, by
Cooper, by Victor Hugo and Dumas, by Manzoni, and by all the others
who followed in their footsteps in every modern language. Not only
born story-tellers but writers who were by natural gift poets or
dramatists, seized upon the novel as a form in which they could
express themselves freely and by which they might hope to gain a
proper reward in money as well as in fame. The economic interpretation
of literary history has not received the attention it deserves; and
the future investigator will find a rich field in his researches for
the causes of the expansion of the novel in the nineteenth century
simultaneous with the decline of the drama in the literature of almost
every modern language except French.

As the nineteenth century drew towards its maturity, the influence of
Balzac reinforced the influence of Scott; and realism began to
assert its right to substitute itself for romance. The adjustment
of character to its appropriate background, the closer connection of
fiction with the actual facts of life, the focusing of attention
on the normal and the usual rather than on the abnormal and the
exceptional,--all these steps in advance were more easily taken in
the freer form of the novel than they could be in the more restricted
formula of the drama; and for the first time in its history
prose-fiction found itself a pioneer, achieving a solidity of texture
which the theater had not yet been able to attain.

The novel revealed itself at last as a fit ins