English prose" we need not boast ourselves too much. But
Pigault has this "go"--never perhaps for a whole book, but sometimes for
passages of considerable length, which possess "carrying" power. It
undoubtedly gave him his original popularity, and we need not despise it
now, inasmuch as it makes less tedious the task of ascertaining and
justifying his true place in the further "domestication"--if only in
domesticities too often mean and grimy--of the French novel.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The French novel in 1800.]

There are more reasons than the convenience of furnishing a separately
published first volume with an interim conclusion, for making, at the
close of this, a few remarks on the general state of the French novel at
the end of the eighteenth century. No thoroughly similar point is
reached in the literary history of France, or of any country known to
me, in regard to a particular department of literature. In England--the
only place, which can, in this same department, be even considered in
comparison, although at this very time two novelists, vastly superior to
any of whom France has to boast, were just writing, or just about to
write, and were a little later to revolutionise the novel itself--the
general state and history of the kind had, for nearly two generations,
reached a stage far beyond anything that France could claim. She had
made earlier "running"; on the whole period of some seven hundred years
she had always, till very recently, been in front. But in the novel, as
distinguished from the romance, she had absolutely nothing to show like
our great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century, and hardly anything
to match the later developments of Miss Burney and others in domestic,
of Mrs. Radcliffe and others still in revived romantic fiction. Very
great Frenchmen or French writers had written novels; but, with the
exceptions of Lesage in _Gil Blas_, Prevost in that everlastingly
wonderful "single-speech" of his, and Rousseau in _La Nouvelle Heloise_,
none had written a great novel. No single writer of any greatness had
been a novelist pure and simple. No species[433] of fiction, except the
short tale, in which, through varying forms, France held an age-long
mastery, had been thoroughly developed in her literature.

The main point, where England went right and France went wrong--to be
only in the most equivocal way corrected by such a writer as
Pigault-Lebrun--was the recogn