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suddenly disappears from our records, and the evidence of the Zeno papyri makes it highly probable that the career of the once all-powerful Finance Minister ended in catastrophe. He was almost certainly dismissed from his office, and it is not unlikely that he was put to death. This may have been due merely to the new King's desire to make a clean sweep of the old régime and begin on new lines; but the catastrophic fall of Apollonius suggests more than that, and it is at least a plausible suggestion that his disgrace was due to the Syrian crisis. He had, as we have seen, been closely associated with the marriage of Berenice and Antiochus, which Philadelphus was not likely to have negotiated without the approval and co-operation of his minister. When the match ended in disaster it is likely enough that Euergetes turned in fury on the man to whom he attributed his sister's misfortunes.

At all events, Apollonius fell; and it would be a pleasant testimony to human fidelity if one could record that his trusted agent Zeno fell with him. But no such thing. Apollonius goes, but Zeno remains, and for some years longer continued to reside at Philadelphia, no longer as the administrator of Apollonius's domain, but as a substantial farmer and financier trading on his own account. His records cease about the tenth year of Euergetes, that is 238-37 B.C., and since his papers were found at Philadelphia we may infer that he died there not long after that date.

It will have been seen that the appeal of these texts, to the modern scholar, is many-sided. And yet the fact remains that, in one way, the interests of Zeno's circle, at least as revealed in the letters, were strangely narrow. On this fact, Prof. Rostovtzeff very justly insists. After all, as he points out, these men were Greeks, members of a race one of whose greatest thinkers defined man as a political animal, and whose history, at every turn, illustrates the appositeness of the definition. Yet in all this correspondence there is not one trace of political interest, unless we are to glorify with the name of politics the petty feuds and animosities of Apollonius's court. Greek culture was already beginning that career of world conquest which made it possible for a great poet to say with truth 2,000 years later, we are all Greeks now." It is to Greece we owe the origin of our mathematics, our philosophy, our science, our medicine, and even

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much of our theology; and Greek literature is, ultimately, the main source of half the European literature of to-day. Yet these letter-writers betray no interest in literature, or philosophy, or mathematics, or even in science except in so far as it was of a purely practical kind. Only in three points can we find any trace of those interests which we regard as typically Greek. While travelling in the Fayum, Zeno was attacked by a wild boar, and was saved by his Indian hound Tauron, but at the cost of the dog's life. In gratitude he erected a grave-stone over the faithful animal, and for this purpose commissioned, no doubt from one of the court poets at Alexandria, an epitaph. In one of these papyri we have, probably in the poet's own hand, drafts of two specimen epigrams submitted for Zeno's approval. There are also the documents relating to the palæstra, and some others which deal with the training of a boy in harp-music. But in both these cases there is talk of a competition, so that Zeno's interest was only too probably of a commercial sort; and as regards the epigrams one must confess that they are not good ones.

The natural inference from these facts, drawn by Rostovtzeff, is that Zeno and his friends went to Egypt simply and solely to seek their fortunes. The antiquities of the country, which had excited so keen an interest in Herodotus, meant nothing to them; the lovely æsthetic life, the thought, the politics of their own country were forgotten; all they thought of was how to "make their pile." The inference is indeed a little precarious, for it is difficult to prove a negative. But in all ages the men who really care about the things of the spirit are a small minority. It is so to-day; and probably the proportion was not seriously different in ancient Greece. It is not the least service of the Zeno papyri to have reminded us that the Greeks of old, who accomplished such miracles in art and thought, whose achievements are the most priceless heritage of mankind, were after all men, not demi-gods; that even in Hellas it was the few, not the many, who redeemed the world.

H. IDRIS BELL

FOUNDERS OF THE MODERN NOVEL

I. SAMUEL RICHARDSON

Clarissa Harlowe. By SAMUEL RICHARDSON. 1747-48.

BETWEEN the publication of "Robinson Crusoe” (1719)

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and that of "Pamela" (1740), prose fiction produced only one work of genius. In 1726 appeared "Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World," by Lemuel Gulliver, “First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships." Strictly speaking, the book may be excluded from the legitimate field of the novel by its primary object, if not by the impossibilities of its incidents. Swift's design is not to paint but to satirise "the animal called man." Gulliver's Travels " therefore belongs to the same class of literature as More's "Utopia" (1516), or Bacon's "New Atlantis" (1636), or "The Description of a New World called the Blazing World," by the "Thrice Noble, Illustrious and Excellent Princesse, the Duchess of Newcastle " (1668), in which prose fiction is employed for the purpose of expounding the author's view of an ideal polity, or of the advancement of science, or of mechanical progress.

Judging from the contempt with which Swift spoke of Mrs. Haywood as "a stupid, infamous, scribbling woman," he had himself no ambition to be a novelist. Yet, in more than one direction, he helped materially to advance the art. To its resources he added his temperamental humour and irony. He set an example of the charm of narrative. He extended realistic methods to a new sphere. He surrounded his imaginary worlds of Brobdingnag and Lilliput with the same air of veracity which Defoe gave to his narrative of real life. The abundance and familiarity of commonplace detail authenticated his unreal creations by their circumstantiality. Yet with all its minuteness he preserved its perfect consistency, whether he was working to the scale of a pigmy or of a giant. At every turn the effectiveness of his pictures is heightened by the imperturbable gravity and apparently innocent bluntness with which he stated his most whimsical absurdities. To future novelists, also, he bequeathed

the model of an admirable English style. Always clear, clouded by no literary artifices or mannerisms, it never becomes stagnant, because it ripples and sparkles with the play of ironic humour.

During the twenty years which separated Defoe from Richardson," Gulliver's Travels " stands out by itself in prose fiction. Yet, within that period, upwards of a hundred novels by native hands were published. The quantity of the output is significant of the growing demand for some form of literary relaxation. As compared with the preceding thirty years, the rate of production was doubled, if not trebled. None of the writers contributed anything to the advance of the novelist's art in their own or kindred fields. Instead of developing on the lines of the "Coverley Papers," or of "Robinson Crusoe," or of "Gulliver's Travels," writers imitated the short "Histories and Novels " of the "late ingenious Mrs. Behn." No name of literary distinction was set to a novel. Novels were still despised by men of letters. Theatrical authorship attracted the best pens. It was the readiest road to literary fame and fortune. Congreve had deserted novel-writing to win wealth and celebrity as a dramatist. Fresh from their triumphs as essayists, Addison and Steele turned to the production, not of novels, but of plays. Unless the Licensing Act had been passed in 1737, Fielding might have continued his theatrical work and never written "Tom Jones." With an unacted tragedy in his pocket, Smollett crossed the border to seek his literary fortune in London.

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A❝ Person of Quality," or " of Honour," or " of Distinction is sexless, and if men wrote novels, they wrote anonymously. The best work was done by women. By far the most popular novelist of the day-male, female, or anonymous-was Eliza Haywood. For her own generation her pale swarm of Clarinas, Cleomelias, Idalias, Lasselias and Placentias had an immense attraction. Her short stories were many times reprinted, both separately and in the collected form of the four volumes of her "Secret Histories" (1725 and 1732). She had an eye for dramatic situations and seems to have instinctively felt that, without sentiment, bald matter-of-fact statements, however plausible, were too dry a soil for the expansion of the novel. Her instinct was justified by her success. She was, however, capable of better things. Her best work, though still imitative, was done twenty years later when the art of the novelist had been

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transformed by Richardson and Fielding. The difference between her stories before and after "Clarissa Harlowe " and "Tom Jones" illustrates the change that had been worked both in the structural form of novels and in their truth of representation. Her History of Miss Betty Thoughtless" (1751), and her History of Jimmy and Jenny Jessamy " (1753) are on the direct way to becoming modern novels of real life and character.

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In the progress of novels, the richness of output at this particular period is more interesting than the poorness of quality. The mass of production implied a felt demand for literary entertainment. Defoe's commercial instinct was not at fault when, towards the close of his career, he employed his journalistic skill and experience on prose fiction. The great circulation reached by the Spectator proved that a reading public already existed. To it were now added readers whose literary tastes were perhaps less fastidious. Every day the middle classes were growing richer, better educated, more important than they had ever been before; they demanded a literature, not merely for their instruction and improvement, but for the amusement of their increasing leisure. For this new public Defoe successfully catered. Of its growth and tastes the publication of the first collection of novels by various hands affords a slight but significant indication. In 1720-21, Samuel Croxall published in six volumes "A Select Collection of Novels." Foreign fiction was still the fashion. To the twenty-six novels Cervantes was by far the largest contributor. In the second edition (1729) the title was enlarged to "Novels and Histories," and ten stories were added, in six of which > historical personages like Henry II and Fair Rosamund, Jane Shore, Lady Jane Grey, Mary Queen of Scots, the Earl of Essex and Massaniello play the principal parts. But only two novels by English hands-" Charon and "The Black Mountain -are included.

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It is evident from the success of Defoe, of Croxall's "Collection," and, it may be added, of Mrs. Haywood, that in the second quarter of the eighteenth century the demand for a representation of life, whether as it was or as it was desired to be, was growing fast. For more than a century after the close of the Elizabethan age, the triumphs of the stage had arrested the growth of the novel and starved its production. Plays read at home in private as well as acted on the stage in public, had given it little

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