red rose chain," cursing also terribly,
goes off to write a book against the age, and to prove that nobody is
wise but himself.

I can hardly imagine more than one cavil being made against this by the
most carping of critics and the most wedded to the crotchet of
"kinds"--that it is too dramatic for a _story_, and that we ought to
have had it as a drama. If this were further twisted into an accusation
of plagiarism from the actual theatre, I think it could be rebutted at
once. The situations separately might be found in many dramas; the
characters in more; but I at least am not aware of any one in which they
had been similarly put together. Of course most if not all of us have
seen actresses who would make Clarice charming, Madame de Ponval
amusing, and Doris and Lucinde very delectable adjuncts; as well as
actors by whom the parts of Cleon and Ariste would be very effectively
worked out. But why we should be troubled to dress, journey, waste time
and money, and get a headache, by going to the theatre, when we can
enjoy all this "in some close corner of [our] brain," I cannot see. As I
read the story in some twenty minutes, I can see _my_ Clarice, _my_
Madame de Ponval, _my_ Doris and Lucinde and Cleon and Ariste and
Jasmin--the silent but doubtless highly appreciative valet,--and I
rather doubt whether the best company in the world could give me quite
that.

[Sidenote: A real advance in these.]

But, even in saying this, full justice has not yet been done to
Marmontel. He has, from our special point of view, made a real further
progress towards the ideal of the ordinary novel--the presentation of
ordinary life. He has borrowed no supernatural aid;[398] he has laid
under contribution no "fie-fie" seasonings; he has sacrificed nothing,
or next to nothing, in these best pieces, whatever he may have done
elsewhere, to purpose and crotchet. He has discarded stuffing,
digression, episode, and other things which weighed on and hampered his
predecessors. In fact there are times when it seems almost unjust, in
this part of his work, to "second" him in the way we have done; though
it must be admitted that if you take his production as a whole he
relapses into the second order.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.]

The actual books, in anything that can be called fiction, of Bernardin
de Saint-Pierre are of far less merit than Marmontel's; but most people
who have even the slig