urely literary matters,
it would be difficult, from the side of literature as an art--I do not
say as a craft--to say anything for him whatever. His style[426] is, I
should suppose (for I think no foreigner has any business to do more
than "suppose" in that matter), simply wretched; he has sentences as
long as Milton's or Clarendon's or Mr. Ruskin's, not merely without the
grandeur of the first, the beauty of the last, and the weighty sense of
the second, but lacking any flash of graceful, pithy, or witty phrase;
character of the model-theatre and cut-out paper kind; a mere
accumulation of incidents instead of a plot; hardly an attempt at
dialogue, and, where description is attempted at all, utter
ineffectiveness or sheer rhyparography.[427]

It is a fair _riposte_ to the last paragraph to ask, "Then why do you
drag him in here at all?" But the counter-parry is easy. The excepted
points above supply it. With all his faults--admitting, too, that every
generation since his time has supplied some, and most much better,
examples of his kind--the fact remains that he was the first
considerable representative, in his own country, of that variety of
professional novelist who can spin yarns, of the sort that his audience
or public[428] wants, with unwearied industry, in great volume, and of a
quality which, such as it is, does not vary very much. He is, in short,
the first notable French novelist-tradesman--the first who gives us
notice that novel-production is established as a business. There is even
a little more than this to be said for him. He has really made
considerable progress, if we compare him with his predecessors and
contemporaries, in the direction of the novel of ordinary life, as that
life was in his own day. There are extravagances of course, but they are
scarcely flagrant. His atmosphere is what the cooks, housemaids,
footmen, what the grocers and small- or middle-class persons who, I
suppose, chiefly read him, were, or would have liked to be, accustomed
to. His scene is not a paradise in either the common or the Greek sense;
it is a sort of cabbage-garden, with a cabbage-garden's lack of beauty,
of exquisiteness in any form, with its presence of untidiness, and
sometimes of evil odour, but with its own usefulness, and with a
cultivator of the most sedulous. Pigault-Lebrun, for France, may be said
to be the first author-in-chief of the circulating library. It may not
be a position of exceeding honour; but it is