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There were nine Muses in Greece of old, and no one of these daughters of Apollo was expected to inspire the writer of prose-fiction. Whoever had then a story to tell, which he wished to treat artistically, never dreamed of expressing it except in the nobler medium of verse, in the epic, in the idyl, in the drama.
Another French critic, M. Le Breton, in his account of the growth of French prose-fiction in the first half of the nineteenth century, has asserted that this exemption from criticism really redounded to the benefit of the novel, since the despised form was allowed to develop naturally, spontaneously, free from all the many artificial restrictions which the dogmatists succeeded in imposing on tragedy and on comedy, and which resulted at last in the sterility of the French drama toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.
The influence of the English eighteenth-century essay on the growth of prose-fiction, not only in the British Isles, but also on the continent of Europe, is larger than is generally admitted. Indeed, there is a sense in which the successive papers depicting the character and the deeds of Sir Roger de Coverley may be accepted as the earliest of serial stories.
There were nine muses in Greece of old, and no one of these daughters of Apollo was expected to inspire the writer of prose-fiction. Whoever had then a story to tell, which he wished to treat artistically, never dreamed of expressing it except in the nobler medium of verse, in the epic, in the idyl, in the drama.
There are not lacking signs of late that the drama is likely in the immediate future to assert a sharper rivalry with prose-fiction; and novelists like Mr. Barrie and M. Hervieu have relinquished the easier narrative for the more difficult and more dangerous stage-play. But there is no evidence that the novel is soon to lose its vogue.
It is more probable that, as regards prose-fiction, they did not realize that they were called upon to explain the omission of the tenth muse. Her exclusion was based on no reasoned principle, but was due to a sensuous art-instinct: the Greeks felt that the unnatural limitations of the poetic medium were more in keeping with the unnatural brevity of a story which must be short.
But there is truth, no doubt, in the contention that the novel is freer, more fluid, more flexible than the play; and that there are themes and subjects unsuited to the stage and wholly within the compass of the story-teller. To say this is but to repeat again that the drama is not prose-fiction and prose-fiction is not the drama, just as painting is not sculpture and sculpture not painting.
However much it might then be deemed unworthy of serious consideration, the novel in the eighteenth century began to attract to itself more and more authors of rich natural endowment. In English literature especially, prose-fiction tempted men as unlike as Defoe and Swift, Richardson and Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, Goldsmith and Johnson.
It was a saying of the old bard of Brittany that "he who will not answer to the rudder must answer to the rocks"; and not a few writers of prose-fiction have made shipwreck because they gave no heed to this warning.
The adjustment of character to its appropriate background, the closer connection of fiction with the actual facts of life, the focusing of attention on the normal and the usual rather than on the abnormal and the exceptional, all these steps in advance were more easily taken in the freer form of the novel than they could be in the more restricted formula of the drama; and for the first time in its history prose-fiction found itself a pioneer, achieving a solidity of texture which the theater had not yet been able to attain.
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