in _Julie_, but in touching it he is almost
as limited and exclusive as Prevost in his masterpiece. Diderot has to
get hold of the abnormal, if not the unreal, before he can give you
something like a true novel. Marmontel is half-fanciful, and though he
does touch reality, subordinates it constantly to half-allegorical and
wholly moral purpose. All the minor "Sensibility" folk follow their
leaders, and so do all the minor _conteurs_.

The people (believed to be a numerous folk) who are uncomfortable with a
fact unless some explanation of it is given, may be humoured here. The
failure of a very literary nation--applying the most disciplined
literary language in Europe to a department, in the earlier stages of
which they had led Europe itself--to get out of the trammels which we
had easily discarded, is almost demonstrably connected with the very
nature of their own literary character. Until the most recent years, if
not up to the very present day, few Frenchmen have ever been happy
without a type, a "kind," a set of type-and kind-rules, a classification
and specification, as it were, which has to be filled up and worked
over. Of all this the novel had nothing in ancient times, while in
modern it had only been wrestling and struggling towards something of
the sort, and had only in one country discovered, and not quite
consciously there, that the beauty of the novel lies in having no type,
no kind, no rules, no limitations, no general precept or motto for the
craftsman except "Here is the whole of human life before you. Copy it,
or, better, recreate it--with variation and decoration _ad libitum_--as
faithfully, but as freely, as you can." Of this great fact even
Fielding, the creator of the modern novel, was perhaps not wholly aware
as a matter of theory, though he made no error about it in practice.
Indeed the "comic prose epic" notion _might_ reduce to rules like those
of the verse. Both Scott and Miss Austen abstained likewise from
formalising it. But every really great novel has illustrated it; and
attempts, such as have been recently made, to contest it and draw up a
novelists' code, have certainly not yet justified themselves according
to the Covenant of Works, and have at least not disposed some of us to
welcome them as a Covenant of Faith. It is because Pigault-Lebrun,
though a low kind of creature from every point of view, except that of
mere craftsmanship, did, like his betters, recognise the fact in
practice, th