is as naught compared to the grasping deeds of the novelist. And whereas
the painter and the composer have got into difficulties with their
audacious schemes, the novelist has poached, colonised, and annexed with
a success that is not denied. There is scarcely any aspect of the
interestingness of life which is not now rendered in prose fiction--from
landscape-painting to sociology--and none which might not be.
Unnecessary to go back to the ante-Scott age in order to perceive how
the novel has aggrandised itself! It has conquered enormous territories
even since _Germinal_. Within the last fifteen years it has gained. Were
it to adopt the hue of the British Empire, the entire map of the
universe would soon be coloured red. Wherever it ought to stand in the
hierarchy of forms, it has, actually, no rival at the present day as a
means for transmitting the impassioned vision of life. It is, and will
be for some time to come, the form to which the artist with the most
inclusive vision instinctively turns, because it is the most inclusive
form, and the most adaptable. Indeed, before we are much older, if its
present rate of progress continues, it will have reoccupied the dazzling
position to which the mighty Balzac lifted it, and in which he left it
in 1850. So much, by the way, for the rank of the novel.




II


In considering the equipment of the novelist there are two attributes
which may always be taken for granted. The first is the sense of
beauty--indispensable to the creative artist. Every creative artist has
it, in his degree. He is an artist because he has it. An artist works