NOVELS WHICH HAVE MADE HISTORY BY SIR WALTER BESANT HISTORY is "made" by the novelist in two ways. The first is by the presentation of the ideas, laws, manners, customs, religion, prejudices, and fashions of the time so faithfully that the historian of the future can by his help understand the period, and reconstruct the life of that generation. I would instance, as the leading representatives of this kind of novelist, Defoe, Fielding, and Dickens. It would be quite possible, I doubt not, to reconstruct a great part of the early eighteenth century without the help of Defoe but not the whole. The essayists give us the manners and the humours of the coffee-house; they also give us an insight into the mind of scholar, critic, and divine of the period. Swift's Letters disclose the current talk of politicians. That mine of contemporary manners, The Athenian Oracle, introduces us to the governing ideas on religion and morality among the bourgeois class. The two worthies, Tom Brown and Ned Ward, leave nothing, apparently, untold as regards the taverns, night-houses, bagnios, and the coarse profligacy of their time. To go no farther, here is a great mass of information out of which the historian can make a catalogue if not a picture-it is too often the catalogue that appears. But it is by a picture and not by a catalogue that the world is enabled to understand and to realise events and modes of thought, past or present, of which it has itself formed no part. To make a picture one must select, and arrange, and find characters, and group them, either for one situation or for many. In other words, the picture may be a painting-which is one way xiii of presenting the past, subject to the disadvantage of being no more than one set scene: or it may be a novel, that is to say, a succession of "animated photographs." We are saved the trouble of constructing this succession of animated photographs in the case of Defoe. In that wonderful series of novels which he began at an age when most men are thinking of rest, he has photographed and fixed for ever the city life which rolled on around him. We are led through the streets of London; we see the poor little waifs and strays, the pickpockets, the motherless girls, the wretched women, the soldiers; the apprentices, the tradesmen, the merchants,—all that the city of London contained at that time. Especially, he enables us to understand, as no other writer of the time can do-certainly not Addison or Swift, neither of whom knew the city-that strange revival of enterprise and adventure which possessed our people at that time. We are so much accustomed to think of the scholarly calm of Addison and his friends; of the slow and dignified carriage which would not admit of haste; of the round smooth face on which leisure seems stamped; of the full wig which must not be disarranged by eager gesture;-that we do not realise the animation of change; the busy crowds of the port; the merchants preparing their next venture into unknown seas to unknown nations; the arrival of the weather - beaten captain after a brush with the Moorish pirates. These things we find in Defoe and in Defoe alone. . So also with Fielding. The life which he drew is not that of the City; it is that of the country and the West-End. The country gentleman, the adventurer, the debtor's prison, the fine Court lady, the bully, the valet, the broken captain, the coffee-house, the tavern, the gaming table-are they not all in Fielding? Or, to take Dickens. Is he not the chief exponent, the chief authority, for the very life of that vast section of the people called sometimes the "lower middle class"- the class which stands between the professional and the working man? How the people talked fifty years ago; what were their manners, their amusements |