vivacious, and yet subtle tragedy, he is truly great.

We must now glance at the effects which the Romantic Movement produced upon the art which was destined to fill so great a place in the literature of the nineteenth centurythe art of prose fiction. With the triumph of Classicism in the seventeenth century, the novel, like all other forms of literature, grew simplified and compressed. The huge romances of Mademoiselle de Scudéry were succeeded by the delicate little stories of Madame de Lafayette, one of which-La Princesse de Clèves-a masterpiece of charming psychology and exquisite art, deserves to be considered as the earliest example of the modern novel. All through the eighteenth century the same tendency is visible. Manon Lescaut, the passionate and beautiful romance of l'Abbé Prévost, is a very small book, concerned, like La Princesse de Clèves, with two characters only-the lovers, whose varying fortunes make up the whole action of the tale. Precisely the same description applies to the subtle and brilliant Adolphe of Benjamin Constant, produced in the early years of the nineteenth century. Even when the framework was larger-as in Le Sage's Gil Blas

and Marivaux's Vie de Marianne-the spirit was the same; it was the spirit of selection, of simplification, of delicate skill. Both the latter works are written in a prose style of deliberate elegance, and both consist rather of a succession of small incidentsalmost of independent short stories-than of one large developing whole. The culminating example of the eighteenth century form of fiction may be seen in the Liaisons Dangereuses of Laclos, a witty, scandalous, and remarkably able novel, concerned with the interacting intrigues of a small society of persons, and revealing on every page a most brilliant and concentrated art. Far more modern, both in its general conception and in the absolute realism of its treatment, was Diderot's La Religieuse; but this masterpiece was not published till some years after the Revolution; and the real honour of having originated the later developments in French fiction-as in so many other branches of literature belongs undoubtedly to Rousseau. La Nouvelle Héloïse, faulty as it is as a work of art, with its feeble psychology and loose construction, yet had the great merit of throwing open whole new worlds for the exploration of the novelist-the world of nature on the one hand, and on the other

the world of social problems and all the living forces of actual life. The difference between the novels of Rousseau and those of Hugo is great; but yet it is a difference merely of degree. Les Misérables is the consummation of the romantic conception of fiction which Rousseau had adumbrated half a century before. In that enormous work, Hugo attempted to construct a prose epic of modern life; but the attempt was not successful. Its rhetorical caste of style, its ceaseless and glaring melodrama, its childish presentments of human character, its endless digressions and-running through all this-its evidences of immense and disordered power, make the book perhaps the most magnificent failure— the most "wild enormity" ever produced by a man of genius. Another development of the romantic spirit appeared at about the same time in the early novels of George Sand, in which the ardours of passionate love are ecstatically idealised in a loose and lyric flow of innumerable words.

There can be little doubt that if the development of fiction had stopped at this point the infusion into it of the romantic spirit could only have been judged a disaster. From the point of view of art, such novels as those of Victor Hugo and the early works of George

Sand were a retrogression from those of the eighteenth century. Manon Lescaut, tiny, limited, unambitious as it is, stands on a far higher level of artistic achievement than the unreal and incoherent Les Misérables. The scale of the novel had indeed been infinitely enlarged, but the apparatus for dealing adequately with the vast masses of new material was wanting. It is pathetic to watch the romantic novelists trying to infuse beauty and significance into their subjects by means of fine writing, lyrical outbursts, impassioned philosophical dissertations, and all the familiar rhetorical devices so dear to them. The inevitable result was something lifeless, formless, fantastic; they were on the wrong track. The true method for the treatment of their material was not that of rhetoric at all; it was that of realism. This fact was discovered by STENDHAL, who was the first to combine an enlarged view of the world with a plain style and an accurate, unimpassioned, detailed examination of actual life. In his remarkable novel, Le Rouge et Le Noir, and in some parts of his later work, La Chartreuse de Parme, Stendhal laid down the lines on which French fiction has been developing ever since. The qualities which distinguish him are those which have distinguished all the greatest of

his successors—a subtle psychological insight, an elaborate attention to detail, and a remorseless fidelity to the truth.

Important as Stendhal is in the history of modern French fiction, he is dwarfed by the colossal figure of BALZAC. By virtue of his enormous powers, and the immense quantity and variety of his output, Balzac might be called the Hugo of prose, if it were not that in two most important respects he presents a complete contrast to his great contemporary. In the first place, his control of the technical resources of the language was as feeble as Hugo's was mighty. Balzac's style is bad; ? in spite of the electric vigour that runs through his writing, it is formless, clumsy, and quite without distinction; it is the writing of a man who was highly perspicacious, formidably powerful, and vulgar. But, on the other hand, he possessed one great quality which Hugo altogether lacked the sense of the real. Hugo was most himself when he was soaring on the wings of fancy through the empyrean; Balzac was most himself when he was rattling in a hired cab through the streets of Paris. He was of the earth earthy. His coarse, large, germinating spirit gave forth, like the earth, a teeming richness, a solid,