annot be therein introduced
without lowering the ideal of man. Between the naturalistic and the
idealistic novel he unhesitatingly declares for the latter, and places
George Sand far above the author of 'L'Assommoir.'

But the great success of his labors cannot be said to have been due
solely or even mainly to the principles he advocated. Other critics have
appeared since--Messrs. Jules Lemaitre and Anatole France, for
instance,--who antagonize almost everything that he defends and defend
almost everything that he antagonizes, and whose success has hardly been
inferior to his. Neither is it due to any charm in his style.
Brunetiere's sentences are compact,--indeed, strongly knit
together,--but decidedly heavy and at times even clumsy. What he has to
say he always says strongly, but not gracefully. He has a remarkable
appreciation of the value of the words of the French language, but his
arrangement of them is seldom free from mannerisms. What, then, has made
him the foremost literary critic of the present day? The answer is,
knowledge and sincerity. No writer of the present day, save perhaps
Anatole France, is so accurately informed of every fact that bears upon
literary history. Every argument he brings forward is supported by an
array of incontrovertible facts that is simply appalling. No one can
argue with him who does not first subject himself to the severest kind
of training, go through a mass of tedious reading, become familiar with
dates to the point of handling them as nimbly as a bank clerk handles
the figures of a check list. And all this comes forward in Brunetiere's
articles in the most natural, we had almost said casual way. The fact
takes its place unheralded in the reasoning. It is there because it has
to be there, not because the writer wishes to make a display of his
wonderful knowledge; and thus it happens that Ferdinand Brunetiere's
literary articles are perhaps the most instructive ones ever written in
the French language. They are moreover admirably trustworthy. It would
never come to this author's mind to hide a fact that goes against any of
his theories. He feels so sure of being in the right that he is always
willing to give his opponents all that they can possibly claim.

Of late years, moreover, it must be acknowledged that Brunetiere's mind
has given signs of remarkable broadening. Under the influence of the
doctrine of evolution, he has undertaken to class all literary facts as
the great nat