opying" are such misleading versions of this--of actual characters, to
evolve a personality which will be recognised by all competent observers
as somebody whom he has actually met or might have met? Or should he,
trusting to his own personal powers of putting together qualities and
traits, but more or less neglecting the patterns which the Almighty has
put before him in _tout le monde_--sometimes also regarding conventional
types and "academies"--either (for this is important) to follow or
violently _not_ to follow them--produce something that owes _its_
personality to himself only? The former has been the aim of the great
English novelists since Fielding, if not since Richardson[347] or even
Defoe. It was the aim of Lesage: he has told us so in so many words. It
is by no means alien from that of Marivaux, though he did not pursue it
with a single eye; and the same may be said even of Crebillon. Whether
Prevost aimed at it or not, he hit the white in _Manon_ as certainly and
unmistakably as he lost his arrows elsewhere. Rousseau both did it and
meant it in the first part of _Julie_. Pigault, in a clumsy, botcherly
fashion, made "outers" not infrequently. But Laclos seems to me to have
(as his in some sense follower Dumas _fils_ has it in the passage noted
above) "proceeded by synthesis"--to have said, "Let us make a
mischievous Marquise and a vile Viscount. Let us deprive them of every
amiable quality and of every one that can be called in any sense 'good,'
except a certain kind of intellectual ability, and, in the Viscount's
case, an ingenious fancy in the matter of extemporising writing-desks."
And he did it; and then the people who think that because (to adopt the
language of George de Barnwell) "the True is not always the Beautiful"
the Ugly must always be the True, hail him as a master.[348]

That this half-digression, half-dilemma, is prospective as well as
retrospective will hardly form a subject of objection for any one but a
mere fault-finder. From the top of a watershed you necessarily survey
both slopes. The tendency which we have been discussing is certainly
more prevalent in the second half of the century than in the first half.
It is prominent in Dumas _fils_, with whom we shall be dealing shortly;
it increases as time goes on; and it becomes almost paramount in the
practice of and the discussions about the Naturalist School. In the time
on which we look back it is certainly important in Beyle and Balzac. B