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
Heloise_, 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 Miserables_ 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 cast
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 idealized 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 Miserables_.
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, form