They were placed amid the
scenes which seemed most attractive, and were endowed with the
qualities which seemed most admirable to the men whose imaginations
created them. But, with the exception perhaps of Robin Hood, they were
purely ideal, without prototypes in nature. The writer of fiction had
not yet turned his attention to the delineation of character, to the
study of complex social questions, to the portrayal of actual life.
With the fall of Puritan power, begins a great intellectual change.
History shows, since the Restoration, a tendency which has continuously
grown stronger and wider, to subordinate the imagination to the reason
of man, to withdraw political and social questions from the influence
of mere tradition, to subject them instead, to the test of practical
experience, and to encourage the patient physical investigations which
have resulted in the triumphs of modern science. This tendency has
pervaded all the channels of human industry. Its effect upon works of
fiction has been to introduce into that department of literature, a
spirit of realism, and a love of investigating the problems of life and
character, which have resulted in the modern novel. Henceforth we shall
meet no more ideal beings, but men or women, more or less true to
nature. In the fiction of the Restoration are first observable the new
tendencies, which, although but slightly marked at first, have finally
given to the English novel its present importance.
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