was in his actual hey-day.  Between them, they had dealt and were dealing—­from curiously different sides and in as curiously different manners—­the death-blow to the notion that the novel was an inferior if not actually discreditable kind, suitable for weak intellects only, and likely to weaken strong ones, frivolous when not positively immoral, giving a distaste for serious reading, implying in the writer an inability to do anything more serious, and generally presenting a glaring contrast to real “literature.”

Interesting as each of these two great novelists is individually, the interest of the pair, from our present historical point of view, is almost greater; and the way in which they complete each other is hardly short of uncanny.  Before their time, despite the great examples of prose fiction produced by Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and the remarkable determination towards the life of ordinary society given, or instanced, by Miss Burney; despite the immense novel-production of the last half of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth—­it is hardly too much to say that “the novel,” as such, had not found its proper way or ways at all.  Bunyan’s was an example of genius in a peculiar kind of the novel:  as, in a very different one, was Sterne’s.  Defoe, possessing some of the rarest gifts of the novelist, was quite lacking in others.  Richardson was not only exemplar vitiis imitabile and imitatum, but it might be doubted whether, even when not faulty, he was not more admirable than delightful.  Smollett, like Defoe, was not much more than part of a novelist:  and Miss Burney lacked strength, equality, and range.  There remained Fielding:  and it certainly is not here that any restrictions or allowances will be insinuated as to Fielding’s praise.  But Fielding’s novels are a circle in which no one else save Thackeray has ever been able to walk.  And what we are looking for now is something rather different from this—­a masterpiece, or masterpieces, which may not only yield delight and excite admiration in itself or themselves, but may bring forth fruit in others—­fruit less masterly perhaps, but of the same or a similar kind.  In other words, nobody’s work yet—­save in the special kinds—­had been capable of yielding a novel-formula:  nobody had hit upon the most capital and fruitful novel-ideas.  And nearly everybody had, in the kind, done work curiously and almost incomprehensibly faulty.  Of these faults, the worst, perhaps, were classable under the general head of inverisimilitude.  Want of truth to nature in character and dialogue, extravagant and clumsy plotting, neglect of (indeed entire blindness to) historic colour, unreal and unobserved description—­all these things might be raised to a height or sunk to a bathos in the work of the Minerva Press—­but there was far too much of them in all the novel work of these sixty or seventy years.