e been credited, of
being able to see at a glance whether anything on a page needs more
than that glance or not, a faculty not likely to have been rendered
abortive (though also not, I hope, rendered morbid) by infinite practice
in reviewing. I do not say that, even now, I have read every word of
this _Artamene_ as I should read every word of a sonnet of Shakespeare
or a lyric of Shelley, even as I should read every word of a page of
Thackeray. I have even skimmed many pages. But I have never found, even
in a time of "retired leisure," that I could get through more than
three, or at the very utmost four, of the twenty volumes or half-volumes
without a day or two of rest or other work between. On the other hand,
the book is not significantly piquant in detail to enable me to read
attentively fifty or a hundred pages and then lay it down.[189] You do,
in a lazy sort of way, want to know what happened--a tribute, no doubt,
to Mlle. Madeleine--and so you have to go on ploughing the furrow. But
several weeks' collar-work[190] is a great deal to spend on a single
book of what is supposed to be pastime; and the pastime becomes
occasionally one of doubtful pleasure now and then. In fact, it is, as
has been said, best to read in shifts. Secondly, there may, no doubt, be
charged a certain unreality about the whole: and a good many other
criticisms may be, as some indeed have been already, made without
injustice.

The fact is that not only was the time not yet, but something which was
very specially of the time stood in the way of the other thing coming,
despite the strong _nisus_ in its favour excited by various influences
spoken of at the beginning of this chapter. This was the
devotion--French at almost all times, and specially French at this--to
the type. There are some "desperate willins" (as Sam Weller called the
greengrocer at the swarry) who fail to see much more than types in
Racine, though there is something more in Corneille, and a very great
deal more in Moliere. In the romances which charmed at home the
audiences and spectators of these three great men's work abroad, there
is nothing, or next to nothing, else at all. The spirit of the _Epistle
to the Pisos_, which acted on the Tragedians in verse, which acted on
Boileau in criticism and poetry, was heavier on the novelist than on any
of them. Take sufficient generosity, magnanimity, adoration, bravery,
courtesy, and so forth, associate the mixture with handsome flesh