He contrived to observe in
his writing a scrupulous and realistic fidelity and appropriateness to
the conditions in which the story was to be told. We learn about
Crusoe's island, for instance, gradually just as Crusoe learns of it
himself, though the author is careful by taking his narrator up to a
high point of vantage the day after his arrival, that we shall learn
the essentials of it, as long as verisimilitude is not sacrificed, as
soon as possible. It is the paradox of the English novel that these our
earliest efforts in fiction were meant, unlike the romances which
preceded them, to pass for truth. Defoe's _Journal of the Plague Year_
was widely taken as literal fact, and it is still quoted as such
occasionally by rash though reputable historians. So that in England the
novel began with realism as it has culminated, and across two centuries
Defoe and the "naturalists" join hands. Defoe, it is proper also in this
place to notice, fixed the peculiar form of the historical novel. In his
_Memoirs of a Cavalier_, the narrative of an imaginary person's
adventures in a historical setting is interspersed with the entrance of
actual historical personages, exactly the method of historical romancing
which was brought to perfection by Sir Walter Scott.
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