That the essay and its branch form, the character sketch, both found in the Spectator Papers, were contributory to the Novel’s development, is sure.  The essay set a new model for easy, colloquial speech:  just the manner for fiction which was to report the accent of contemporary society in its average of utterance.  And the sketch, seen in its delightful efflorescence in the Sir Roger De Coverly papers series by Addison, is fiction in a sense:  differing therefrom in its slighter framework, and the aim of the writer, which first of all is the delicate delineation of personality, not plot and the study of the social complex.  There is the absence of plot which is the natural outcome of such lack of story interest.  A wide survey of the English essay from its inception with Bacon in the early seventeenth century will impress the inquirer with its fluid nature and natural outflow into full-fledged fiction.  The essay has a way, as Taine says, of turning “spontaneously to fiction and portraiture.”  And as it is difficult, in the light of evolution, to put the finger on the line separating man from the lower order of animal life, so is it difficult sometimes to say just where the essay stops and the Novel begins.  There is perhaps no hard-and-fast line.

Consider Dr. Holmes’ “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” for example; is it essay or fiction?  There is a definite though slender story interest and idea, yet since the framework of story is really for the purpose of hanging thereon the genial essayist’s dissertations on life, we may decide that the book is primarily essay, the most charmingly personal, egoistic of literary forms.  The essay “slightly dramatized,” Mr. Howells happily characterizes it.  This form then must be reckoned with in the eighteenth century and borne in mind as contributory all along in the subsequent development, as we try to get a clear idea of the qualities which demark and limit the Novel.

Again, the theater was an institution doing its share to knit social feeling; as indeed it had been in Elizabethan days:  offering a place where many might be moved by the one thought, the one emotion, personal variations being merged in what is now called mob psychology, a function for centuries also exercised by the Church.  Nor should the function of the playhouse as a visiting-place be overlooked.

So too the Novel came to express most inclusively among the literary forms this more vivid realization of meum and tuum; the worth of me and my intricate and inevitable relations to you, both of us caught in the coils of that organism dubbed society, and willingly, with no Rousseau-like desire to escape and set up for individualists.  The Novel in its treatment of personality began to teach that the stone thrown into the water makes circles to the uttermost bounds of the lake; that the little rift within the lute makes the whole music mute; that we are all members of the one body.  This germinal principle was at