amin Constant, and much
earlier and less brilliantly, but still with important results, by
Madame de Montolieu. The age-long competence of the French in _conte_
and _nouvelle_ was always ready for fresh adaptation; and at the very
beginning of the new century, and even earlier, two reinforcements of
the most diverse character came to the French novel. Pigault-Lebrun and
Ducray-Duminil (the earliest of whose novels appeared just before the
Revolution as Pigault's debut was made just after it) may be said to
have democratised the novel to nearly[565] the full meaning of that much
abused word. They lowered its value aesthetically, ethically (at least
in Pigault's case, while Ducray's morality does not go much above the
"Be amiable and honest" standard), logically, rhetorically, and in a
good many other ways. But they did not merely increase the number of its
readers; in so doing they multiplied correspondingly the number of its
practitioners, and so they helped to make novel-writing a business
and--through many failures and half-successes--to give it a sort of
regularised practice, if not a theory.

Yet if this democratisation of the novel thus went partly but, as does
all democratisation inevitably, to the degradation of it in quality,
though to its increase in quantity, there were fortunately other
influences at work to provide new reinforcements, themselves in some
cases of quality invaluable. It has been admitted that neither
Chateaubriand nor Madame de Stael can be said to have written a
first-class novel--even _Corinne_ can hardly be called that. But it is
nearer thereto than anything that had been written since the first part
of _La Nouvelle Heloise_: while _Rene_ and _Atala_ recover, and more
than recover in tragic material, the narrative power of the best comic
tales. And these isolated examples were of less importance for the
actual history--being results of individual genius, which are not
imitable--than certain more general characteristics of the two writers.
Between them--a little perhaps owing to their social position, but much
more by their pure literary quality--they reinstated the novel in the
Upper House of literature itself. In Madame de Stael there was more than
adequacy--in Chateaubriand there was sometimes consummateness--of style;
in both, with whatever varnish of contemporary affectation, there was
genuine nobility of thought. They both chose subjects worthy of their
powers, and Madame de Stael at l