offers some
explanation of the unquestioned facts about this; also (and this is of
infinitely more importance) of that absence of ability to love
literature in anything like a passionate way, which, with a certain
other inability to love literature for itself, prevents him from
attaining the absolutely highest level in criticism, though his command
of ranges just below the highest is wider and firmer than that of any
other critic on record.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Jules Sandeau and Charles de Bernard.]

We may next take, to some extent together, two writers of the novel who
made their reputation in the July Monarchy, though one of them long
outlived it; who, though this one inclined to a sort of domestic tragedy
and the other to pure comedy, resembled each other not a little in
clinging to ordinary life, and my estimate of whom is considerably
higher than that recently (or, I think, at present) entertained by
French critics or by those English critics who think it right to be
guided by their French _confreres_. This estimate, however, has been
given at length in another place,[265] and I quite admit that the
subjects, though I have not in the least lowered my opinion of them, can
hardly be said (like Gautier, Merimee, Balzac, and Dumas, in the present
part of this volume, or others later) to demand, in a general History,
very large space in dealing with them. I shall therefore endeavour to
summarise my corrected impressions more briefly than in those other
cases. This shortening may, I think, be justified doubly: in the first
place, because any one who is enough of a student to want more can go to
the other handling; and, in the second, because the only excellent way,
of reading the books themselves, may be adopted with very unusual
absence of any danger of disappointment. I hardly know any work of
either Jules Sandeau or of Charles de Bernard which is not worth reading
by persons of fairly catholic tastes in novel pastime.

The first-named--the younger by some half-dozen years, but the first to
publish by more than as many--concerns those who take a merely or mainly
anecdotic interest in literature by his well-known _liaison_ with George
Sand--to whom he gave _dimidium nominis_, and perhaps for a time at
least _dimidium cordis_, though he probably did not get it back so much
"in a worse estate"[266] as was the case with Musset and Chopin.
Sandeau's collaboration with her in novel-writ