itical and
chronological date. To take it as an absolute apex or culmination would
be absurd; and even to take it as a definite turning-point might be
excessive. Not a few of the greatest novelists then living and
working--Hugo, whose most popular and bulkiest work in novel was yet to
come; George Sand, Merimee, Gautier--were still to write for the best
part of a quarter of a century, if not more; and the most definite fresh
start of the second period, the rise of Naturalism, was not to take
place till a little later. But already Chateaubriand, Beyle, Charles de
Bernard, and, above all, Balzac, were dead or soon to die: and it cannot
be said that any of the survivors developed new characters of work, for
even Hugo's was (_v. sup._) only the earlier "writ large" and
modernised in non-essentials. On the other hand, it was only after this
time that Dumas _fils_, the earliest of what may be called the new
school, produced his most remarkable work.

But the justification of such an "Interchapter" as this practically is
depends, not on what is to come after, but on what has come before; and
in this respect we shall find little difficulty in vindicating the
position and arrangement assigned to the remarks which are to follow,
though some of these may look forward as well as backward.[329]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: A political nadir.]

I should imagine that few Frenchmen--despite the almost infinite and
sometimes very startling variety of selection which the _laudator
temporis acti_ exhibits--look back upon the reign of Louis Philippe as a
golden age in any respect but one. Regarding it from the point of view
of general politics, the ridiculous change[330] from "King of France" to
"King of the French" stamped it at once, finally and hopelessly, as the
worst kind of compromise--as a sort of spiritual imitation of the
methods of the Triumvirate, where everybody gives up, not exactly his
father or his uncle or his brother, but his dearest and most respectable
convictions, together with the historical, logical, and sentimental
supports of them. The king himself--though certainly no fool, and though
hardly to be called an unmitigated knave--was one of those unfortunate
persons whose merits do not in the least interest and whose defects do
very strongly disgust. Domestically, the reign was a reign, in the other
sense, of silly minor revolutions, which, till the end, came to nothing,
and then came to so