acters, in depicting one phase of life. With this thought,
I read the works of Walter Scott. Walter Scott, the modern _trouvere_,
was then giving a gigantic vogue to a kind of composition unjustly
called secondary. Is it not really harder to compete with the registry
of births, marriages, and deaths by means of Daphnis and Chloe,
Roland, Amadis, Panurge, Don Quixote, Manon Lescaut, Clarissa,
Lovelace, Robinson Crusoe, Ossian, Julie d'Etanges, My Uncle Toby,
Werther, Rene, Corinne, Adolphe, Gil Blas, Paul and Virginia, Jeanie
Deans, Claverhouse, Ivanhoe, Manfred, Mignon, than to arrange facts
almost similar among all nations, to seek for the spirit of laws
fallen into decay, to draw up theories which lead people astray, or,
as certain metaphysicians, to explain what exists? First of all,
nearly all these characters, whose existence becomes longer, more
genuine than that of the generations amid which they are made to be
born, live only on condition of being a vast image of the present.
Conceived in the womb of the century, the whole human heart moves
beneath their outward covering; it often conceals a whole philosophy.
Walter Scott, therefore, raised to the philosophic value of history
the novel--that literature which from century to century adorns with
immortal diamonds the poetic crown of the countries where letters are
cultivated. He put into it the spirit of ancient times; he blended in
it at once drama, dialogue, portraiture, landscape, description; he
brought into it the marvellous and the true, those elements of the
epopee; he made poetry mingle in it with the humblest sorts of
language. But having less invented a system than found out his manner
in the ardour of work, or by the logic of this work, he had not
thought of linking his compositions to each other so as to co-ordinate
a complete history, each chapter of which would have been a novel and
each novel an epoch. Perceiving this want of connection, which, indeed
does not render the Scotchman less great, I saw both the system that
was favourable to the execution of my work, and the possibility of
carrying it out. Although, so to speak, dazzled by the surprising
fecundity of Walter Scott, always equal to himself and always
original, I did not despair, for I found the reason of such talent in
the variety of human nature. _Chance is the greatest novelist in the
world._ To be fertile, one has only to study it. French society was to
be the historian. I was to be only