olutions that ushered in the
nineteenth century. But these mostly meaner things themselves claimed
attention; they filled the life of men if they did not glorify it;
classes and occupations which had been almost altogether non-vocal began
to talk and be talked about, and so the change again held on.

Lastly, of course, there was the increase of education: with which the
demand for fiction, plentiful in quantity and easily comprehended, was
sure to grow.

On the whole, however, the results concern us more than the causes. What
is the general character of this large province, or, looking at it in
another way, of these accumulated crops, which the fifty years more
specially in question saw added to the prose fiction of France?

The answer is pretty much what any wide student of history--political,
social, literary, or other--would expect, supposing, which is of course
in fact an impossibility, that he could come to the particular study
"fresh and fasting." Novel-writing in France, as elsewhere, became more
and more a business; and so, while the level of craftsmanship might be
to some extent raised, the level of artistic excellence was
correspondingly lowered. It has been before observed more than once
that, to the present critic, only Flaubert and Maupassant of the writers
we have been discussing in these later chapters can be credited with
positive genius, unless the too often smoky and malodorous torch of Zola
be admitted to qualify for the Procession of the Chosen. But when we
take in the whole century the retrospect is very different; and while
the later period may suffer slightly in the respect just indicated, the
earlier affords it some compensation in the other noted point.

There is, indeed, no exact parallel, in any literature or any branch of
literature within my knowledge, to the manifold development of the
French novel during these hundred years. Our own experience in the same
department cannot be set in any proper comparison with it, for the four
great novelists of the mid-eighteenth century, and their followers from
Miss Burney downwards, with the Terror and the Political schools of the
extreme close, had advanced our starting-point so far that Scott and
Miss Austen possessed advantages not open to any French writer. On the
other hand, the Sensibility School, which was far more numerously
attended in France than in England, gave other openings, which _were_
taken advantage of in a special direction by Benj