Besides the Reliques, Percy has given us another good work in his Northern Antiquities (1770) translated from the French of Mallet’s History of Denmark.  This also was of immense influence, since it introduced to English readers a new and fascinating mythology, more rugged and primitive than that of the Greeks; and we are still, in music as in letters, under the spell of Thor and Odin, of Frea and the Valkyr maidens, and of that stupendous drama of passion and tragedy which ended in the “Twilight of the Gods.”  The literary world owes a debt of gratitude to Percy, who wrote nothing of importance himself, but who, by collecting and translating the works of other men, did much to hasten the triumph of Romanticism in the nineteenth century.

III.  THE FIRST ENGLISH NOVELISTS

The chief literary phenomena of the complex eighteenth century are the reign of so-called Classicism, the revival of romantic poetry, and the discovery of the modern novel.  Of these three, the last is probably the most important.  Aside from the fact that the novel is the most modern, and at present the most widely read and influential type of literature, we have a certain pride in regarding it as England’s original contribution to the world of letters.  Other great types of literature, like the epic, the romance, and the drama, were first produced by other nations; but the idea of the modern novel seems to have been worked out largely on English soil;[211] and in the number and the fine quality of her novelists, England has hardly been rivaled by any other nation.  Before we study the writers who developed this new type of literature, it is well to consider briefly its meaning and history.

MEANING OF THE NOVEL.  Probably the most significant remark made by the ordinary reader concerning a work of fiction takes the form of a question:  Is it a good story?  For the reader of to-day is much like the child and the primitive man in this respect, that he must be attracted and held by the story element of a narrative before he learns to appreciate its style or moral significance.  The story element is therefore essential to the novel; but where the story originates is impossible to say.  As well might we seek for the origin of the race; for wherever primitive men are found, there we see them gathering eagerly about the story-teller.  In the halls of our Saxon ancestors the scop and the tale-bringer were ever the most welcome guests; and in the bark wigwams of the American Indians the man who told the legends of Hiawatha had an audience quite as attentive as that which gathered at the Greek festivals to hear the story of Ulysses’s wanderings.  To man’s instinct or innate love for a story we are indebted for all our literature; and the novel must in some degree satisfy this instinct, or fail of appreciation.