"This being so, why have you given half a chapter to
these two writers, even with Lesage and Marivaux to carry it off?" The
reason is that this is (or attempts to be) a history of the French
novel, and that, in such a history, the canons of importance are not the
same as those of the novel itself. _Gil Blas_, _Marianne_, _Manon
Lescaut_, and perhaps even _Le Hasard au Coin du Feu_ are interesting in
themselves; but the whole work of their authors is important, and
therefore interesting, to the historical student. For these authors
carried further--a great deal further--the process of laying the
foundations and providing the materials and plant for what was to come.
Of actual masterpieces they only achieved the great, but not _equally_
great, one of _Gil Blas_ and the little one of _Manon Lescaut_. But it
is not by masterpieces alone that the world of literature lives in the
sense of prolonging its life. One may even say--touching the unclean
thing paradox for a moment, and purifying oneself with incense, and
salt, and wine--that the masterpieces of literature are more beautiful
and memorable and delectable in themselves than fertile in results. They
catch up the sum of their own possibilities, and utter it in such a
fashion that there is no more to say in that fashion. The dreary
imitation _Iliads_, the impossible sham _Divina Commedias_, the
Sheridan-Knowles Shakespearian plays, rise up and terrify or bore us.
Whereas these second-rate experimenters, these adventurers in quest of
what they themselves hardly know, strike out paths, throw seed, sketch
designs which others afterwards pursue, and plant out, and fill up.
There are probably not many persons now who would echo Gray's wish for
eternal romances of either Marivaux or Crebillon; and the accompanying
remarks in the same letter on _Joseph Andrews_, though they show some
appreciation of the best characters, are quite inappreciative of the
merit of the novel as a whole. For eternal variations of _Joseph
Andrews_, "_Passe!_" as a French Gray might have said.

Nevertheless, I am myself pretty sure that Marivaux at least helped
Richardson and Fielding, and there can be no doubt that Crebillon helped
Sterne. And what is more important to our present purpose, they and
their companions in this chapter helped the novel in general, and the
French novel in particular, to an extent far more considerable. We may
not, of course, take the course of literary history--general or
p