novel,
and a romance which had much better have been poetry. But this is an
excursion into the Forbidden Country of the Might-Have-Been. We are
concerned with what was.

The accomplishment of these twenty or five-and-twenty years is so
extraordinary--when bulk, variety, novelty, and greatness of achievement
are considered together--that there is hardly anything like it
elsewhere. The single work of Balzac would mark and make an epoch; and
this is wholly the property of the period. And though there is still,
and is likely always to be, controversy as to whether the Balzacian men
and women are exactly men and women of _this_ world, there can, as may
have been shown, be no rational denial of the fact that they represent
_a_ world--not of pure romance, not of fairy-tale, not of convention or
fashion or coterie, but a world human and synthetically possible in its
kind.

[Sidenote: The _personnel_.]

But while the possession of Balzac alone would have sufficed, by itself,
to give the time front rank among the periods of the novel, it is not in
the least extravagant to add that if Balzac had been blotted out of its
record it could still prove title-deeds enough, and more than enough, to
such a place. Fault has here been found--perhaps not a few readers may
think to an excessive, certainly to a considerable extent--with the
novel-work of Hugo and with that of George Sand. But the fault-finder
has not dreamed of denying that, as literature in novel-form, _Les
Miserables_ and _L'Homme Qui Rit_ and _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ are great,
and that _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ is of the greatest.[335] And on
the other hand, while strong exceptions have been taken from several
sides to the work of George Sand, the fact remains--and no attempt has
been made to obscure or to shake it--that George Sand gave novel
delectation, in no vulgar fashion, and to no small extent in the form of
the pure novel itself, probably to as large a number of readers as any
novelist except Scott and Dumas; and perhaps Dickens, has ever given. Of
the miraculous production of Dumas himself almost enough should have
been said before, though a little more may come after; and whatever
controversy there may be about its purely literary value, there
can--with reasonable people who are prepared to give and take--be little
anxiety to deny that each of these three, like Balzac, might have taken
the burden of the period on his or her own shoulders, while as a matter
of