s history to, or nearer to, the present day. I put
my negative to this briefly in the earlier preface: it may be perhaps
courteous to others, who may be disposed to regret the refusal, to give
it somewhat more fully here. One reason--perhaps sufficient in
itself--can be very frankly stated. I do not _know_ enough of the French
novel of the last twenty years or so. During the whole of that time I
have had no reasons, of duty or profit, to oblige such knowledge. I have
had a great many other things to do, and I have found greater recreation
in re-reading old books than in experimenting on new ones. I might, no
doubt, in the last year or two have made up the deficiency to some
extent, but I was indisposed to do so for two, yea, three reasons, which
seemed to me sufficient.

In the first place, I have found, both by some actual experiment of my
own, and, as it seems to me, by a considerable examination of the
experiments of other people, that to co-ordinate satisfactorily accounts
of contemporary or very recent work with accounts of older is so
difficult as to be nearly impossible. The _foci_ are too different to be
easily adjusted, and the result is almost always out of composition, if
not of drawing.

Secondly, though I know I am here kicking against certain pricks, it
does not appear to me, either from what I have read or from criticisms
on what I have not, that any definitely new and decisively illustrated
school of novels has arisen since the death of M. Zola.

Thirdly, it would be impossible to deal with the subject, save in an
absurdly incomplete fashion, without discussing living persons. To doing
this, in a book, I have an unfashionable but unalterable objection. The
productions of such persons, as they appear, are, by now established
custom, proper subjects for "reviewing" in accordance with the decencies
of literature, and such reviews may sometimes, with the same proviso, be
extended to studies of their work up to date. But even these latter
should, I think, be reserved for very exceptional cases.

A slight difference of method may be observed in the treatment of
authors in Chapter X. and onwards, this treatment being not only
somewhat less judicial and more "impressionist," but also more general
and less buckrammed out with abstracts of particular works.[4] There
appeared to me to be more than one reason for this, all such reasons
being independent of, though by no means ignoring, the mechanical
pressure of