Fiction in the First Part of the Eighteenth Century.—­Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe shows a great advance over preceding fiction.  In the hands of Defoe, fiction became as natural as fact.  Leslie Stephen rightly calls his stories “simple history minus the facts.”  Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is artfully planned to make its impossibilities seem like facts. Robinson Crusoe took another forward step in showing how circumstances and environment react on character and develop the power to grapple with difficulties and overcome them.  Unlike the majority of modern novels, Defoe’s masterpiece does not contain a love story.

The essay of life and manners at the beginning of the eighteenth century presents us at once with various pigments necessary for the palette of the novelist.  Students on turning to the second number of The Spectator will find sketches of six different types of character, which are worthy to be framed and hung in a permanent gallery of English fiction.  The portrait of Sir Roger de Coverley may even claim one of the places of honor on the walls.

Distinction between the Romance and the Modern Novel.—­The romances and tales of adventure which had been so long in vogue differ widely from the modern novel.  Many of them pay but little attention to probability; but those which do not offend in this respect generally rely on a succession of stirring incidents to secure attention.  Novels showing the analytic skill of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, or the development of character in George Eliot’s Silas Marner would have been little read in competition with stirring tales of adventure, if such novels had appeared before a taste for them had been developed by habits of trained observation and thought.

We may broadly differentiate the romance from the modern novel by saying that the romance deals primarily with incident and adventure for their own sake, while the novel concerns itself with these only in so far as they are necessary for a faithful picture of life or for showing the development of character.

Again, the novel gave a much more prominent position to that important class of human beings who do the most of the world’s work,—­a type that the romance had been inclined to neglect.

[Illustration:  SAMUEL RICHARDSON. From an original drawing.]

Samuel Richardson, the First Modern English Novelist.—­Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) was born in Derbyshire.  When he was only thirteen years old some of the young women of the neighborhood unconsciously began to train him for a novelist by employing him to conduct their love correspondence.  This training partly accounts for the fact that every one of his novels is merely a collection of letters, written by the chief characters to each other and to their friends, to narrate the progress of events.