it connects
itself more with the actual society, manners, fashions of its day than
had ever been the case before, and this is the only interesting side of
the "key" part of it. This was the way that they did to some extent talk
and act then, though, to be sure, they also talked and acted very
differently. It is all very well to say that the Hotel de Rambouillet is
a sort of literary-historical fiction, and the _Precieuses Ridicules_ a
delightful farce. The fiction was not wholly a fiction, and the farce
was very much more than a farce--would have been, indeed, not a farce at
all if it had not satirised a fact.

It is, however, in relation to the general history and development of
the novel, and therefore in equally important relation to the present
_History_, that the importance of the _Grand Cyrus_, or rather of the
class of which it was by far the most popular and noteworthy member, is
most remarkable. Indeed this importance can hardly be exaggerated, and
is much more likely to be--indeed has nearly always been--undervalued.
Even the jejune and partial analysis which has been given must have
shown how many of the elements of the modern novel are here--sometimes,
as it were, "in solution," sometimes actually crystallised. For any one
who demands plot there is one--of such gigantic dimensions, indeed, that
it is not easy to grasp it, but seen to be singularly well articulated
and put together when it is once grasped. Huge as it is, it is not in
the least formless, and, as has been several times pointed out, hardly
the most (as it may at first appear) wanton and unpardonable episode,
digression, or inset lacks its due connection with and "orientation"
towards the end. The contrast of this with the more or less formless
chronicle-fashion, the "overthwart and endlong" conduct, of almost all
the romances from the Carlovingian and Arthurian[193] to the _Amadis_
type, is of the most unmistakable kind.

Again, though character, as has been admitted, in any real live sense,
is terribly wanting still; though description is a little general and
wants more "streaks in the tulip"; and though conversation is formal and
stilted, there is evident, perhaps even in the first, certainly in the
second and third cases, an effort to treat them at any rate
systematically, in accordance with some principles of art, and perhaps
even not without some eye to the actual habits, manners, demands of the
time--things which again were quite new in p