Note (return) — Chapter IV · THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL7

Even this gift, and this even in Evelina and the better parts of Cecilia, she had not always with her. The sentimental parts of Evelina—the correspondence with Mr. Villars, the courtship with Lord Orville, and others—are very weak: and it cannot be said that Evelina herself, though she is a pleasant girl enough, gives the lie to Mr. Pope's libel about women. Cecilia has a little more individuality. But the great strength of the former book lies in the admirable lower middle-class pictures of the Branghtons and Mr. Smith, whom Fanny had evidently studied from the life in the queer neighbourhood of Poland Street: as also in the justness and verisimilitude of the picture of the situation, which in different ways both books present—that of the introduction of a young girl to the world.13 In these points, as in others which there is neither space nor need to particularise, Miss Burney showed that she had hit upon—stumbled upon one may almost say—the real principle and essence of the novel as distinguished from the romance—its connection with actual ordinary life—life studied freshly and directly "from the life," and disguised and adulterated as little as possible by exceptional interests and incidents. It is scarcely too much to say that one great reason why the novel was so long coming into existence was precisely this—that life and society so long remained subject to these exceptional interests and incidents. It is only within the last century or so that the "life of 'mergency" (to adapt Mr. Chucks slightly) ceased to be the ordinary life. Addison's "Dissenter's Diary" with its record of nothing but constitutionals and marrow-bones, and Mr. Nisby's opinions, has simply amused half a dozen generations. Yet, in a sense, it has nearly as much to do with the advent of the novel as Sir Roger de Coverley himself. For these things are, not merely in an allegory, the subjects of the novel. Not so very much earlier Mr. Nisby would have had a chance of delivering his opinions on the scaffold: and his disciple would have had prison bread and water for marrow-bones and "Brooks and Hellier." These would have been subjects for romance: the others were subjects for novel.