This is just what Swift’s does, and just what there is very little of in Defoe; almost necessarily less in Addison and his group because of their essay form; and hardly anything elsewhere and earlier.  Just as the Coverley Papers could, by one process and no difficult one, have been thrown into a novel; so by another, a not much more difficult and a much less complicated one, could the Polite Conversation be thrown into part of a novel—­while in each case the incomplete and unintentional draft itself supplies patterns for the complete work in new kind such as had never been given before.  Indeed the Conversation may almost be said to be part of a novel—­and no small part—­as it stands, and of such a novel as had never been written before.

But there was something still further all but absolutely necessary to the novel, though not necessary to it alone, which Defoe, Addison, and Swift, each in his several way, worked mightily to supply:  and that was a flexible business-like “workaday” prose style.  Not merely so long as men aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of Euphues and the Arcadia, but so long as the old splendid and gorgeous, but cumbrous and complicated pre-Restoration style lasted, romances were possible, but novels were not.  You might indeed pick out of Shakespeare—­especially from such parts as those of Beatrice, Rosalind, and some of the fools—­a capital novel-style:  but then you can pick almost anything out of Shakespeare.  Elsewhere the constant presence either of semi-poetic phraseology or of some kind of “lingo” was almost fatal.  You want what Sprat calls a more “natural way of speaking” (though not necessarily a “naked” one) for novel purposes—­a certain absence of ceremony and parade of phrase:  though the presence of slang and some other things, the rebuking of which was partly Swift’s object in the Conversation, is not fatal, and so he, in a manner, blessed and prescribed what he meant to ban.

Thus, by the early years of the reign of George II., or a little later, we find, on the one side, an evident, and variously though inarticulately proclaimed, desire for novels; on the other, the accumulation, in haphazard and desultory way, of almost all the methods, the processes, the “plant,” necessary to turn novels out; but hardly anything except the considered work of Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift which really deserves the name of novel.  A similar process had been going on in France; and, in the different work of Le Sage and Marivaux, had actually produced work in the kind more advanced than anything in English.  But the tables were soon to be turned:  and during the rest of the century the English Novel was at last to assert itself as a distinct, an increasingly popular, and a widely cultivated kind.  That this was due to the work of the four great novelists who fill its central third and will fill our next chapter cannot perhaps be said:  that their work was the first great desertion of it may be said safely.