ever-lessening space. In the first place, a very much larger
number of readers may be presumed to be more or less familiar with the
subjects of discussion, thus not only making elaborate "statement of
case" and production of supporting evidence unnecessary, but exposing
the purely judicial attitude to the charge of "no jurisdiction."
Moreover, there is behind all this, as it seems to me, a really
important principle, which is not a mere repetition, but a noteworthy
extension, of that recently laid down. I rather doubt whether the
absolute historico-critical verdict and sentence can ever be pronounced
on work that is, even in the widest sense, contemporary. The "firm
perspective of the past" can in very few instances be acquired: and
those few, who by good luck have acquired something of it, should not
presume too much on this gift of fortune. General opinion of a man is
during his lifetime often wrong, for some time after his death almost
always so: and the absolute balance is very seldom reached till a full
generation--something more than the conventional thirty years--has
passed. Meanwhile, though all readers who have anything critical in them
will be constantly revising their impressions, it is well not to put
one's own out as more than impressions. It is only a very few years
since I myself came to what I may call a provisionally final estimate of
Zola, and I find that there is some slight alteration even in that
which, from the first, I formed of Maupassant. I can hardly hope that
readers of this part of the work will not be brought into collision with
expressions of mine, more frequently than was the case in the first
volume or even the first part of this. But I can at least assure them
that I have no intention of playing Sir Oracle, or of trailing my coat.

The actual arrangement of this volume has been the subject of a good
deal of "pondering and deliberation," almost as much as Sir Thomas
Bertram gave to a matter no doubt of more importance. There was a
considerable temptation to recur to the system on which I have written
some other literary histories--that of "Books" and "Interchapters." This
I had abandoned, in the first volume, because it was not so much
difficult of application as hardly relevant. Here the relevance is much
greater. The single century divides itself, without the slightest
violence offered, into four parts, which, if I had that capacity or
partiality for flowery writing, the absence of whic