bert's _Madame Bovary_ and _L'Education
Sentimentale_, in comparison with which _Salammbo_ and two of the _Trois
Contes_ (the other is quite in the general drift) are obvious
variations, excursions, reliefs.[561] Feuillet is practically (whatever
may have been his early practice as a "devil"), when he takes to his own
line, modern, and in a sense ordinary or nothing: Daudet the same.
Naturalism _en bloc_ would lose almost all pretence of justifying itself
if it did not stick to the ordinary, or at least actual, though it may
sometimes be a sort of transformed "ordinariness in abnormality." So
great and so fertile a writer as Maupassant leaves us--except in his
supernaturalisms--nothing at all that goes out of the actual probable or
easily possible experience of a Frenchman of 1880-90. The four novelists
who supply the bulk of the last chapter never outstep this. But since
such indulgence in particulars may be thought mere driving at an open
door, let us take the fact for granted, and turn to some consideration
of its causes, results, conditions, features, and the like.

One of the causes is of such certainty and importance that a person, not
indolent or prejudiced, might ask for no other. It is that sempiternal
desire for change[562]--that principle of revolution, which is so much
more certain than any evolution, and which governs human life, though it
is always bringing that life back to the old places, "camouflaged," as
they say nowadays, in a fashion that disguises them to the simple. The
romance of incident, historical and other, had had a long innings, and
people were tired of it. But though this was undoubtedly the main
influence, there were some others which it would be hardly judicious to
neglect. It is true that the greatest of these were, in a fashion, only
partial actions or reactions of the larger one already mentioned.[563]
Beyle and Balzac, the latter of course with important "colours" of his
own, and even the former with some modifications, had, as men of genius
generally do, felt or found the spirit of change early, and their
audiences helped to spread it. And yet minor impulsions might be
indicated. It is a commonplace that from the days of the Napoleonic War
to the middle 'fifties there were few great European events; commercial
progress, developments of colonisation, machinery, literature, and the
arts, somewhat peddling politics,[564] and the like taking the place of
the big wars and the grandiose rev