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152 the same thing—to the same wearisome and obvious category of historical repetition. At the same time, no one who considers, side by side, the fiction of France and England, but must be struck with the fact that the waste of good average second-grade work is infinitely greater with us than with them. The French prose-writers of the lower line attain to results so incomparably more satisfactory than their English fellows. The reason is obvious: there need be no affectation of a search for it. The conditions under which the French writer works are in almost every respect more favourable. Firstly, he inherits the tradition of a genuine prose style. Matthew Arnold sneered at France as famed in all great arts but supreme in none; but does not prose count as a great art? Perhaps at the present moment there is none greater, and where shall we seek for prose to compare with that of France? At about the same period as the English poet was paraphrasing his own emaciate prose into his even more emaciate early sonnets, M. Renan was saying: 'La langue française est puritaine: on ne fait pas de conditions avec elle.' ('The French language is Puritanic: you cannot inflict conditions upon it.') Alas! in England the only thing that was not Puritanic was the English language, and it lay as helpless for any one to inflict conditions upon it in the nineteenth century as it