articular--which has been, as the course which in any case must have
been. But at the same time we cannot neglect the facts. And it is a
quite certain fact that, for the whole of the last half of the
eighteenth century, and nearly the whole of the first quarter of the
nineteenth, the French novel, as a novel, made singularly little
progress. We shall have to deal in the next chapter, if not in the next
two chapters, with at least two persons of far greater powers than any
one mentioned in the last two. But we shall perhaps be able to show
cause why even Voltaire and Rousseau, why certainly Diderot, why
Marmontel and almost every one else till we come, not in this volume, to
Chateaubriand, whose own position is a little doubtful, somehow failed
to attain the position of a great advancer of the novel.

These others, whatever their shortcomings, _had_ advanced it by bringing
it, in various ways, a great deal nearer to its actual ideal of a
completed picture of real human life. Lesage had blended with his
representation a good deal of the conventional picaresque; Marivaux had
abused preciousness of language and petty psychology; Prevost, save in
that marvellous windfall of his and the Muses which the historian of
novels can hardly mention without taking off his hat if he has one on,
or making his best bow if he has not, had gone wandering after
impossible and uninteresting will-o'-the-wisps; Crebillon had done worse
than "abide in his inn," he had abided almost always in his polite[350]
bordello. But all of them had meant to be real; and all of them had, if
only now and then, to an extent which even Madame de la Fayette had
scarcely achieved before, attained reality.

FOOTNOTES:

[309] In fact it has been said, and may be said again, that Lesage is
one of the prophets who have never had so much justice done them in
their own countries as abroad.

[310] The first part of _Gil Blas_ appeared in 1715; and nearly twenty
years later gossip said that the fourth was not ready, though the author
had been paid in advance for it six or seven years earlier.

[311] I have never read it in the original, being, though a great
admirer of Spanish, but slightly versed therein.

[312] This, which is a sort of Appendix to the _Diable Boiteux_, is much
the best of these _opera minora_.

[313] He had a temper of the most _Breton-Bretonnant_ type--not
ill-natured but sturdy and independent, recalcitrant alike to
ill-treatment and to patr