Diderot’s La Religieuse; but this masterpiece was not published till some years after the Revolution; and the real honour of having originated the later developments in French fiction—­as in so many other branches of literature—­belongs undoubtedly to Rousseau. La Nouvelle Heloise, faulty as it is as a work of art, with its feeble psychology and loose construction, yet had the great merit of throwing open whole new worlds for the exploration of the novelist—­the world of nature on the one hand, and on the other the world of social problems and all the living forces of actual life.  The difference between the novels of Rousseau and those of Hugo is great; but yet it is a difference merely of degree. Les Miserables is the consummation of the romantic conception of fiction which Rousseau had adumbrated half a century before.  In that enormous work, Hugo attempted to construct a prose epic of modern life; but the attempt was not successful.  Its rhetorical cast of style, its ceaseless and glaring melodrama, its childish presentments of human character, its endless digressions and—­running through all this—­its evidences of immense and disordered power, make the book perhaps the most magnificent failure—­the most ‘wild enormity’ ever produced by a man of genius.  Another development of the romantic spirit appeared at about the same time in the early novels of George Sand, in which the ardours of passionate love are ecstatically idealized in a loose and lyric flow of innumerable words.

There can be little doubt that if the development of fiction had stopped at this point the infusion into it of the romantic spirit could only have been judged a disaster.  From the point of view of art, such novels as those of Victor Hugo and the early works of George Sand were a retrogression from those of the eighteenth century. Manon Lescaut, tiny, limited, unambitious as it is, stands on a far higher level of artistic achievement than the unreal and incoherent Les Miserables.  The scale of the novel had indeed been infinitely enlarged, but the apparatus for dealing adequately with the vast masses of new material was wanting.  It is pathetic to watch the romantic novelists trying to infuse beauty and significance into their subjects by means of fine writing, lyrical outbursts, impassioned philosophical dissertations, and all the familiar rhetorical devices so dear to them.  The inevitable result was something lifeless, formless, fantastic; they were on the wrong track.  The true method for the treatment of their material was not that of rhetoric at all; it was that of realism.  This fact was discovered by STENDHAL, who was the first to combine an enlarged view of the world with a plain style and an accurate, unimpassioned, detailed examination of actual life.  In his remarkable novel, Le Rouge et Le Noir, and in some parts of his later work, La Chartreuse de Parme, Stendhal laid down the lines on which French fiction has been developing ever since.  The qualities which distinguish him are those which have distinguished all the greatest of his successors—­a subtle psychological insight, an elaborate attention to detail, and a remorseless fidelity to the truth.