[405] In the following pages, and here only in this volume, the author has utilised, though with very considerable alterations, some previously published work, A Study of Sensibility, which appeared originally in the Fortnightly Review for September 1882, and was republished in a volume (Essays on French Novelists, London, 1891) which has been for some years out of print. Much of the original essay, dealing with Marivaux and others already treated here, has been removed, and the whole has been cut down, revised, and adjusted to its new contexts. But it seemed unnecessary to waste time in an endeavour to say the same thing differently about matters which, though as a whole indispensable, are, with perhaps one exception, individually not of the first importance.
[406] These words were originally written more than thirty years ago. I am not sure that there was not something prophetic in them.
[407] Madame de Fontaines in La Comtesse de Savoie and Amenophis "follows her leader" in more senses than one—including a sort of pseudo-historical setting or insetting which became almost a habit. But she is hardly important.
[408] Readers of Thackeray may remember in The Paris Sketch Book ("On the French School of Painting," p. 52, Oxford ed.) some remarks on Jacquand's picture, "The Death of Adelaide de Comminge," which he thought "neither more nor less than beautiful." But from his "it appears," in reference to the circumstances, it would seem that he did not know the book, save perhaps from a catalogue-extract or summary.
[409] The extreme shortness of all these books may be just worth noticing. Reaction from the enormous romances of the preceding century may have had something to do with it; and the popularity of the "tale" something more. But the causa verissima was probably the impossibility of keeping up sentiment at high pressure for any length of time, incident, or talk.
[410] Vide on the process Crébillon's Les Égarements du Cœur et de l'Esprit, as above, pp. 371, 372.
[411] The parallel with "George Eliot" will strike most people.
[412] But for uniformity's sake I should not have translated this, for fear of doing it injustice. "Not presume to dictate," in Mr. Jingle's constantly useful phrase, but it seems to me one of the finest in French prose.
[413] "Craze" has been suggested; but is, I think, hardly an exact synonym.
[414] This may seem to contradict, or at any rate to be inconsistent with, a passage above (p. 367) on the "flirtations" of Crébillon's personages. It is, however, only a more strictly accurate use of the word.