against those more exacting and cramping conceptions of artistic
perfection to which I will recur in a moment, and a return to the lax
freedom of form, the rambling discursiveness, the right to roam, of the
earlier English novel, of "Tristram Shandy" and of "Tom Jones"; and
partly it comes from abroad, and derives a stimulus from such bold and
original enterprises as that of Monsieur Rolland in his "Jean
Christophe." Its double origin involves a double nature; for while the
English spirit is towards discursiveness and variety, the new French
movement is rather towards exhaustiveness. Mr. Arnold Bennett has
experimented in both forms of amplitude. His superb "Old Wives' Tale,"
wandering from person to person and from scene to scene, is by far the
finest "long novel" that has been written in English in the English
fashion in this generation, and now in "Clayhanger" and its promised
collaterals, he undertakes that complete, minute, abundant presentation
of the growth and modification of one or two individual minds, which is
the essential characteristic of the Continental movement towards the
novel of amplitude. While the "Old Wives' Tale" is discursive,
"Clayhanger" is exhaustive; he gives us both types of the new movement
in perfection.

I name "Jean Christophe" as a sort of archetype in this connection,
because it is just at present very much in our thoughts by reason of the
admirable translation Mr. Cannan is giving us; but there is a greater
predecessor to this comprehensive and spectacular treatment of a single
mind and its impressions and ideas, or of one or two associated minds,
that comes to us now _via_ Mr. Bennett and Mr. Cannan from France. The
great original of all this work is that colossal last unfinished book of
Flaubert, "Bouvard et Pécuchet." Flaubert, the bulk of whose life was
spent upon the most austere and restrained fiction--Turgenev was not
more austere and restrained--broke out at last into this gay, sad