• * * The French Novelists from the Revolution to
Proust (by Frederick C. Green, Dent, 7s. 6d.) have not much elbow- room in a volume of three hundred and fifty pages. Mr. Green marshals them with skill, and assigns to each his place with rigid impartiality. He has his prejudices and predilec- tions, but they do not affect the distribution of the space at his disposal. Andre Gide whom he detests is treated as
thoroughly as Barbey d'Aurevilley whom—less excusably-- he admires. He writes as a historian of literature, not primarily as a literary critic ; and his book will be welcomed by the student of the French novel rather for its admirable sketches of lesser men whom the foreigner knows little or not at all—the Janins, the Nodiers, and the Alphonse Karrs-- than for any new light it throws on those whose names are household words throughout Europe. It seems impossible for any critic to write on French literature without plunging into the sea of Classicism and Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism. Mr. Green spares us more than most. He handles the " isms " with discretion and even with a certain degree of originality, though he trips momentarily when, in his legitimate anxiety to contrast the Romanticism of Balzac with that of George Sand, he speaks of " Balzac the classic." Nobody disputes Balzac's place as the greatest of French novelists ; but in form he is certainly the untidiest and the least classical of them all. Mr. Green's work is a text-book, but a text-book of the right kind. It is readable, it is not pedantic, and it keeps in proper perspective both the wood and the trees.
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