ition of the connection--the intimate and
all but necessary connection--of the completed novel with ordinary life.
Look over the long history of fiction which we have surveyed in the last
three or four or five chapters. There is much and sometimes great
literary talent; sometimes, again, even genius; there are episodes of
reality; there are most artful adjustments of type and convention and
the like, of fashion in morals (or immorals) and sentiments. But a real
objective novel of ordinary life, such as _Tom Jones_, or even _Humphry
Clinker_, nay, such inferior approaches to it as exist elsewhere in
English, you will not find. Of the Scudery romances we need not speak
again; for all their key-references to persons, and their abstention
from the supernatural, etc., they are, as wholes, hardly more real than
_Amadis_ and its family themselves. Scarron has some and Furetiere more
objectivity that may be argued for, but the Spanish picaresque has
become a convention, and they, especially Scarron, are aiming more at
the pattern than at the life-model. Madame de la Fayette has much, and
some of her followers a little, real passion; but her manners,
descriptions, etc., are all conventional, though of another kind. The
fairy tales are of course not "real." Marivaux is aiming directly at
Sensibility, preciousness, "psychology," if you like, but not at holding
up the glass to any ordinary nature as such.[434] And though Crebillon
might plead that his convention was actually the convention of hundreds
and almost thousands of accomplished ladies and gentlemen, no one can
deny that it was almost as much a convention as the historical or
legendary acting of the _Comedie Humaine_ by living persons a hundred
years later at Venice.

No writer perhaps illustrates what is being said better than Prevost. No
one of his books, voluminous as they are, has the very slightest
reality, except _Manon Lescaut_; and that, like _La Princesse de
Cleves_, though with much more intensity and fortunately with no alloy
of convention whatever, is simply a study of passion, not of life at
large at all. With the greater men the case alters to some extent in
proportion to their greatness, but, again with one exception, not to
such an extent as to affect the general rule. Voltaire avowedly never
attempts ordinary representation of ordinary life--save as the merest
by-work, it is all "purpose," satire, fancy. Rousseau may not, in one
sense, go beyond that life