more or less consummateness to the
novel-staff and the novel treasury. But she had never quite reached, as
England for two full generations had reached before 1800, the consummate
expression of the--_pure_ novel--the story which, not neglecting
incident, but as a rule confining itself to the incidents of ordinary
life; advancing character to a position at least equal with plot;
presenting the manners of its own day, but charging them with essence of
humanity in all days; re-creates, for the delectation of readers, a new
world of probable, indeed of actual, life through the medium of
literature. And she had rarely--except in the fairy-tale and a very few
masterpieces like _Manon Lescaut_ again and _La Nouvelle
Heloise_[333]--achieved what may be called the Romantic or passionate
novel; while, except in such very imperfect admixtures of the historic
element as _La Princesse de Cleves_, she had never attempted, and even
in these had never attained, the historical novel proper.

Now, in 1850, she had done all this, and more.

[Sidenote: The performance of the time in novel.]

As has been seen, the doing was, if not solely effected between 1830 and
1848, mainly and almost wholly carried out in the second quarter of the
century. In the first, only three persons possessing anything like
genius--Benjamin Constant, Madame de Stael, and Chateaubriand--had
busied themselves with the novel, and they were all strongly charged
with eighteenth-century spirit. Indeed, Constant, as we saw in the last
volume, though he left pattern and stimulus for the nineteenth and the
future generally, really represented the last dying words of that
"Sensibility" school which was essentially of the past, though it was
undoubtedly necessary to the future. Likewise in Madame de Stael, and
still more in Chateaubriand, there was model, stimulus, germ. But they
also were, on the whole, of the eve rather than of the morrow. I have
indeed sometimes wondered what would have happened if Chateaubriand had
gone on writing novels, and had devoted to fiction the talent which he
wasted on the _mesquin_[334] politics of the France of his later days
and on the interesting but restricted and egotistic _Memoires
d'Outre-Tombe_. It is no doubt true that, though old men have often
written great poetry and excellent serious prose, nobody, so
far as I remember, has written a great novel after seventy. For
_Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, if it be great, is a romance rather than a