is, though at the end we may have
again to summarise rather more fully.

[Sidenote: The subjects of the chapter.]

As was there observed, our figures here are, with the possible exception
of Crebillon _Fils_, "larger" persons than those dealt with before them;
and they also mark a further transition towards the condition--the
"employment or vocation"--of the novelist proper, though the polygraphic
habit which has grown upon all modern literature, and which began in
France almost earlier than anywhere else, affects them. Scarron was even
more of a dramatist than of a novelist; and though this was also the
case with Lesage and Marivaux--while Prevost was, save for his
masterpiece, a polygraph of the polygraphs--their work in fiction was
far larger, both positively and comparatively, than his. _Gil Blas_ for
general popularity, and _Manon Lescaut_ for enthusiastic admiration of
the elect, rank almost, if not quite, among the greatest novels of the
world. Marivaux, for all his irritating habit of leaving things
unfinished, and the almost equally irritating affectation of phrase, in
which he anticipated some English novelists of the late nineteenth and
earliest twentieth century, is almost the first "psychologist" of prose
fiction; that is to say, where Madame de la Fayette had taken the
soul-analysis of hardly more than two persons (Nemours scarcely counts)
in a single situation, Marivaux gives us an almost complete dissection
of the temperament and character of a girl and of a man under many
ordinary life-circumstances for a considerable time.

[Sidenote: Lesage--his Spanish connections.]

But we must begin, not with him but with Lesage, not merely as the older
man by twenty years, but in virtue of that comparative "greatness" of
his greatest work which has been glanced at. There is perhaps a doubt
whether _Gil Blas_ is as much read now as it used to be; it is pretty
certain that _Le Diable Boiteux_ is not. The certainty is a pity; and if
the doubt be true, it is a greater pity still. For more than a century
_Gil Blas_ was almost as much[309] a classic, either in the original or
in translation, in England as it was in France; and the delight which it
gave to thousands of readers was scarcely more important to the history
of fiction generally than the influence it exerted upon generation after
generation of novelists, not merely in its own country, but on the far
greater artists in fiction of the eighteenth and early nin