The second, volume of Dr. Baker's "History of the Novel" covers two centuries of what, from the stand point of the great age which opened with Defoe and Richardson, can at best, and with doubtful precision, be called a prolonged. incubation. With doubtful precision bocal what we find is not a gradual ai proach to the final achievement, but. rather a host of adventures and experiments, the most ambitious of as "Euphues" and Detrayed the most, glaringly' perverse persuasion that profusely decorated style ig the essence of story-telling. Mr. Baker does not disguise from the reader the Kind of literary banquet that awaits him. Nor ~has he spared his own pains in giving a faithful and lively account of it. And, second-rate as it is, it becomes in 'a degree impressive from the ime mense versatility of direct which those mainly furil tures were tried, the variety of the literary sdmirations which excited to emulation men who often bungled when they ceased to imitate. Spanish picaro stories, Italian novella, English low life, the romances of Inter Greece—all these and many other rich springs of story were tapped, with the same abounding curiosity and delight and the same fundamental inaptitude for turning them as story to first-rate account. But nowhere have we a more striking illustration of the creative potency of a literary form. gio novel was still struggling born, and becoming merely an abOFtion. But song and drama were alive and pulsing with the and the genius of youth. again and again the very same kind of matter which produced only tamer or ineffective imitation in the novel became enormously fruitful in.
The novel of Bandello and and the rest only became in English when they took shape on the stage as a "Merchant. of Venice," a -"Measnre for Measure," or an "Othello." London bourgeois life, tolerably vitalized by Deloney, became great comedy in "Eastward Ho." It is often as if the resort to drama gave the touch which organizes and me regrates clements before scattered and inchoate.
Nothing, indeed, is more remarkable in the-whole period covered by. this volume than ° the piecemeal way in which the components of great novels ave separately and independently developed. The idol of style dissipates for years the me cipient power of story; when story reasserts itself character, the chief glory of the drama, remains clement tary. And when character in the seventeenth cently becomes the subject of curious and brilliant. study, in the legion of "'character-books! from Hall and Overbury to Fuller and Butler, there is scarcely the faintest attempt to turn portraits into dramatic persona, Even, the authors of "The Spectator," who brought character in the Coverley papers up to the threshold of novel, failed to cross it, The "Utopia," at the other end of the history, two hundred years before, a brilliant example of social exposition in which story ie no less subordinate. Tt will be seen that the task of presenting this vast and varied matter, duly synthetized, was no light one. Mr. Baker's fifteen chapters of critical narrative and comment are adequate to the exacting demands made upon him.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.