ading you are prepared for them,
and either skip them altogether or pass them by without special notice,
repeating the enjoyment of what is better in an unalloyed fashion. And
so doth the excellent old chestnut-myth, which probably most of us have
heard told with all innocence as an original witticism, justify itself,
and one should "prefer the second hour" of the reading to the first. But
if there is a first there will almost certainly be a second, and it will
be a very great pity if there is no reading at all.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Rousseau--the novel-character of the _Confessions_.]

According to the estimate of the common or vulgate (I do not say
"vulgar," though in the best English there is little or no difference)
literary history, Rousseau[362] ranks far higher in the scale of
novel-writing than Voltaire, having left long and ambitious books of the
kind against Voltaire's handful of short, shorter, and shortest stories.
It might be possible to accept this in one sense, but in one which would
utterly disconcert the usual valuers. The _Confessions_, if it were not
an autobiography, would be one of the great novels of the world. A large
part of it is probably or certainly "fictionised"; if the whole were
fictitious, it would lose much of its repulsiveness, retain (except for
a few very matter-of-fact judges) all its interest, and gain the
enormous advantage of art over mere _reportage_ of fact. Of course
Rousseau's art of another kind, his mere mastery of style and
presentation, does redeem this _reportage_ to some extent; but this
would remain if the thing were wholly fiction, and the other art of
invention, divination, _mimesis_--call it what you will--would come in.
Yet it is not worth while to be idly unlike other people and claim it as
an actual novel. It may be worth while to point out how it displays some
of the great gifts of the novel-writer. The first of these--the greatest
and, in fact, the mother of all the rest--is the sheer faculty, so often
mentioned but not, alas! so invariably found, of telling the tale and
holding the reader, not with any glittering eye or any enchantment,
white or black, but with the pure grasping--or, as French admirably has
it, "enfisting"--power of the tale itself. Round this there cluster--or,
rather, in this necessarily abide--the subsidiary arts of managing the
various parts of the story, of constructing characters sufficient to
carry it on,