--total, twenty
louis."

"But what am I to say?"

"Here is your way out of the difficulty," said Blondet, after some
thought. "Say that the envy that fastens on all good work, like wasps
on ripe fruit, has attempted to set its fangs in this production. The
captious critic, trying his best to find fault, has been obliged to
invent theories for that purpose, and has drawn a distinction between
two kinds of literature--'the literature of ideas and the literature of
imagery,' as he calls them. On the heads of that, youngster, say that to
give expression to ideas through imagery is the highest form of art. Try
to show that all poetry is summed up in that, and lament that there
is so little poetry in French; quote foreign criticisms on the
unimaginative precision of our style, and then extol M. de Canalis and
Nathan for the services they have done France by infusing a less prosaic
spirit into the language. Knock your previous argument to pieces by
calling attention to the fact that we have made progress since the
eighteenth century. (Discover the 'progress,' a beautiful word to
mystify the bourgeois public.) Say that the new methods in
literature concentrate all styles, comedy and tragedy, description,
character-drawing and dialogues, in a series of pictures set in the
brilliant frame of a plot which holds the reader's interest. The Novel,
which demands sentiment, style, and imagery, is the greatest creation of
modern days; it is the successor of stage comedy grown obsolete with its
restrictions. Facts and ideas are all within the province of fiction.
The intellect of an incisive moralist, like La Bruyere, the power of
treating character as Moliere could treat it, the grand machinery of a
Shakespeare, together with the portrayal of the most subtle shades of
passion (the one treasury left untouched by our predecessors)--for all
this the modern novel affords free scope. How far superior is all this
to the cut-and-dried logic-chopping, the cold analysis to the eighteenth
century!--'The Novel,' say sententiously, 'is the Epic grown amusing.'
Instance _Corinne_, bring Mme. de Stael up to support your argument. The
eighteenth century called all things in question; it is the task of the
nineteenth to conclude and speak the last word; and the last word of the
nineteenth century has been for realities--realities which live
however and move. Passion, in short, an element unknown in Voltaire's
philosophy, has been brought into play. H