f it should have been popular. It had reached its
sixtieth edition before it had been published a twelvemonth.

[Sidenote: Reflections.]

Sixty editions of one book in one year; three hundred and sixty-seven of
another in twenty; a hundred and forty-two of _Serge Panine_ in five;
sixty-nine of _Le Docteur Rameau_ in certainly at the outside not more;
these are facts which, whatever may be insinuated about the number of an
"edition," cannot be simply put aside. Popularity, as the wiser critics
have always maintained, is no test of excellence; but as they have also
maintained when they were wise, it is a "fact in the case," and it will
not do merely to sneer at it. I should say that the popularity of M.
Ohnet, like other popularities in England as well as in France, is quite
explicable. Novel-writing, once again, had become a business, and he set
himself to carry that business out with a thorough comprehension of what
was wanted. His books, it is to be observed, are generally quite modern,
dealing either with his own day or a few years before it; and modernity
has, for a long time, been almost a _sine qua non_ of what is to please
the public. They are, it has been said, full of situations, and the
situation is what pleases the public most in everything. They came just
when the first popularity of Naturalism was exhausting itself,[548] and
they are not grimy; but, on the other hand, they do not aim at an
excessive propriety. Their characters are not of the best, or even of
the second-best class, as so often defined, but they are sufficient to
work out the situations without startling inadequacy. The public never
really cares, though part of it is sometimes taught to pretend to care,
for style, and the same may be said of the finer kind of description.
The conversation is not brilliant, but, like the character, it serves
its turn. I once knew an excellent gentleman, of old lineage and fair
fortune, who used to say that for his part he could not tell mutton from
venison or Marsala from Madeira, and he thanked God for it. The
novel-reading public,--that at least which reads novels by the three
hundred and fifty thousand,--is very much of the same taste, and I am
sure I hope it is equally pious.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Edouard Rod.]

I have quite a lively remembrance of the advent of M. Edouard Rod, of
the crowning of _Le Sens de la Vie_, and so forth. That advent formed
part of the just ment