are no doubt many more than sixty such batches waiting likewise,[567]
and quite likely to prove as readable as I found M. Ricard.

I have by no means always felt inclined to acquiesce in the endlessly
repeated complaints that the hackwork of literature is worse done in
England than it is in France. But having had a very large experience of
the novels of both languages, having reviewed hundreds of English novels
side by side with hundreds of French as they came from the press, and
having also read, for pleasure or duty, hundreds of older ones in each
literature, I think that the mysterious quality of readableness pure and
simple _has_ more generally belonged to the French novel than to the
English. This, as I have endeavoured to point out, is not a question of
naughtiness or niceness, of candour or convention. I have indeed
admitted that the conventions of the French novel bore me quite as much
as anything in ours. It _may_ be partly a question of length, for, as
everybody knows, the French took to the average single volume, of some
three hundred not very closely printed pages, much sooner than we took
to anything of the kind. It is perhaps partly also due to what one of
the reviewers of my former volume well called the greater "spaciousness"
of the English novel, that is to say, its inclusion of more diverse
aims, and episodic subjects, and minor interests generally. For this,
while it makes for superior greatness when there is strength enough to
carry it off, undoubtedly requires _more_ strength, and so gives more
openings for weakness to show itself. There are many average English
novels which I should not mind reading, and not a few that I should like
to read, again, while there are but few French novels that I should care
to read so often as I have cared to read the great English ones. But I
could read, for a second time, a very much larger proportion of average
French fiction.

Of those books which are "above average" I have tried to say what I
thought ought to be said in the volume itself, and there is no need of a
"peroration with _much_ circumstance" about them. It is a long way--a
perfect maze of long ways leading through the most different countries
of thought and feeling--from Atala dying in the wilderness to Chiffon
doing exquisitely balanced justice to herself and the Jesuit, by
allowing that while he and she were both _bien eleves_, he was _un peu
trop_ and she was not. It is not so far, except in time, n