Page:Tales of two countries.djvu/10

xii ideal of Flaubert or Maupassant, and regarding himself as a passionless recorder of observations and deductions made in cold blood. He is always what the Germans call "tendentious." Bureaucracy, pedantry, hypocrisy are not, in his eyes, phenomena to be dispassionately studied like any other manifestations of the human spirit, but vices to be lashed and crucified. Though he is far too modern to adopt the "hero, heroine and villain formula"; though he is too much of an artist to paint ideal characters immaculately good or immitigably bad; yet he does not affect to treat his characters with stony impartiality, or shrink from letting us divine his sympathies and antipathies. Quite foreign to him, however, is our English habit of intercalating moral, social, or humorous essays in the pauses of a narrative. He never obtrudes his own personality, never button holes the reader for an interlude of gossip, never indulges in those ingenuous devices, so dear to English writers who at this time of day ought to know better, for making a novel seem something else than a novel—a bundle of letters, for instance, or an autobiography, or a sentimental diary, or a series of affidavits. Where he pauses in his narrative it is not to "moralize the spectacle," but