institution of the English novel: Defoe's contribution, The

"Accordingly," Scott declares, "a style of novel has arisen, within the last fifteen or twenty years, differing from the former in the points upon which the interest hinges; neither alarming our credulity nor amusing our imagination by wild variety of incident, or by those pictures of romantic affection and sensibility, which were formerly as certain attributes of fictitious characters as they are of rare occurrence among those who actually live or die." The difficulties and the dangers for the new style stem from the very features that generate new pleasures, since "he who paints a scene of common occurrence, places his composition within that extensive range of criticism which general experience offers to every reader":

We, therefore, bestow no mean compliment upon the author of Emma, when we say that, keeping close to common incidents, and to such characters as occupy the ordinary walks of life, she has produced sketches of such spirit and originality, that we never miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising from the consideration of minds, manners, and sentiments, greatly above our own. In this class she stands almost alone. (231) Here then is Scott's "rise of the novel," "a class of fictions which has arisen almost in our own times," "a style of novel ... arisen ... within the last fifteen or twenty years," that is, between 1795 and 1800.

The distinction Scott makes between Austen and her predecessors is the same distinction he makes between romance and novel at the opening of his "Essay on Romance" and attributes to Dr. Johnson, although he continues to use both terms alternately, often without distinction, often about the same texts. Here the distinction is not only historical but generational. The novel is a deviant but legitimate offspring of the romance and therefore is another version of his story about the circumstances of the origin of romance. The distinction is more than one between the fantastic and the actual or ordinary, for the new fiction lacks story: "Emma has even less story than either of the preceding novels," Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice (232). The novelist "paints sketches" of ordinary people and ordinary life. The Romancer weaves a complex plot which eventually reaches improbable but perfect closure: "That combined plot, (the object of every skilful novelist,) in which all the more interesting individuals of the dramatis personae have their appropriate share in the action and in bringing about the catastrophe,' or, as he adds later, "a regular drama, in which every person introduced plays an appropriate part, and every point of the action tends to one common catastrophe" (229-30). "Here," he announces, "even more than in its various and violent changes of fortune, rests the improbability of the novel" (228). This fall into story is, of course, what places such earlier eighteenth-century novels as Fielding's too close to its parent, or, "more nearly assimilated to the old romances" (229), as Ian Watt complains.