ted or appreciated it: that was left for the eighteenth
century to do. Meanwhile Hamilton brought the double influence to bear,
not merely on the French novel, but on the novel in general and on the
eccentric novel in particular. To appreciate him properly, he ought to
be compared with Rabelais before him and with Voltaire or Sterne--with
both, perhaps, as a counsel of perfection--after him. He is a smaller
man, both in literature and in humanity, than Master Francis; but the
phrase which Voltaire himself rather absurdly used of Swift might be
used without any absurdity in reference to him. He _is_ a "Rabelais de
bonne compagnie," and from the exactly opposite point of view he might
be called a Voltaire or a Sterne _de bonne compagnie_ likewise. That is
to say, he is a gentleman pretty certainly as well as a genius, which
Rabelais might have been, at any rate in other circumstances, but did
not choose to be, and which neither Francois Arouet nor Laurence Sterne
could have been, however much either had tried, though the metamorphosis
is not quite so utterly inconceivable in Sterne's case as in the
other's. Hamilton, it has been confessed, is sometimes "naughty"; but
his naughtiness is neither coarse nor sniggering,[308] and he depends
upon it so little--a very important point--that he is sometimes most
amusing when he is not naughty at all. In other words, he has no need of
it, but simply takes it as one of the infinite functions of human
comedy. Against which let Mrs. Grundy say what she likes.

* * * * *

It is conceivable that objection may be taken, or at any rate surprise
felt, at the fulness with which a group of mostly little books--no one
of them produced by an author of the first magnitude as usual estimates
run--has been here handled. But the truth is that the actual birth of
the French novel took a much longer time than that of the English--a
phenomenon explicable, without any national vainglory, by the fact that
it came first and gave us patterns and stimulants. The writers surveyed
in this chapter, and those who will take their places in the next--at
least Scarron, Furetiere, Madame de La Fayette and Hamilton, Lesage,
Marivaux, and Prevost--whatever objections or limitations may be brought
against them, form the central group of the originators of the modern
novel. They open the book of life, as distinguished from that of
factitious and rather stale literature; they point out t