ron himself has a good deal of it; in fact there is
so much in the Spanish picaresque novel that it could not be absent from
the followings thereof. For which same reason there is not a very little
of it in Lesage, while, for an opposite one, there is less in Marivaux,
and hardly any at all in Crebillon or Prevost. The _philosophes_, except
Diderot--who was busy with other things and used his acquaintance with
miscellaneous "documents" in another way--would have disdained it, and
the Sentimentalists still more so. But it is a sign of the shortcomings
of Pigault-Lebrun--especially considering the evident discipleship to
Smollett, in whom there is no small amount of such detail--that, while
in general he made a distinct advance in "ordinary" treatment, he did
not reinforce this advance with circumstantial accounts of "beds and
basons."

But with the immense and multifarious new birth of the novel at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, this development also received, in
the most curiously diverse ways, reinforcement and extension. The Terror
novel itself had earlier given a hand, for you had to describe, more or
less minutely, the furniture of your haunted rooms, the number and
volume of your drops of blood, the anatomical characteristics of your
skeletons, and the values of your palette of coloured fires. The
Historical novel lugged document in too often by head and shoulders,
introducing it on happier occasions as the main and distinguishing
ornament of its kind. Romanticism generally, with its tendency to
antiquarian detail, its liking for _couleur locale_, its insistence on
the "streaks of the tulip" and the rest, prompted the use and at least
suggested the abuse.

[Sidenote: Some individual pioneers--especially Hugo.]

Nor did the great individual French novelists--for we need not specify
any others--of the earlier part of the century, while they themselves
kept to the pleasant slopes above the abyss, fail to point the way to
it. Chateaubriand with his flowery descriptions of East and West, and
Madame de Stael with her deliberate guide-bookery, encouraged the
document-hunter and detail-devotee. Balzac, especially in the directions
of finance and commerce, actually set him an example. George Sand,
especially in pure country stories, was prodigal of local and technical
matters and manners. The gorgeous scenery of Gautier, and the soberer
but important "settings" of Merimee, might be claimed as models. And
others