Indeed, from this we might go on to notice that as far as the short story is concerned, most of the finer and more lasting work, though cast in forms which quite _permit_ of the dialogue, has, as a matter of fact, but little dialogue in it. Balzac’s _La Grenadière_--it is years since I read it; but has it any dialogue at all? Balzac’s _L’Interdiction_--an extraordinary presentation of a quaint functionary, fossiliferous and secluded, suddenly brought into contact with people of the world, and with the utmost ability baffling their financial intrigue--this is certainly the most remarkable short story ever written about money--_L’Interdiction_ has not much dialogue. In the _Atheist’s Mass_, again--the short story of such a nameless pathos--the piece which, more even than _Eugénie Grandet_ itself, should be everybody’s introduction, and especially every woman’s introduction, to the genius of Balzac: _La Messe de l’Athée_ has no dialogue. Coming to our actual contemporaries in France, of whom Zola and Daudet must still, it is possible, be accounted the foremost, it is natural that the more finished and minute worker--the worker lately lamented--should be the one who has made the most of the short story. And in this order of his work--thus leaving out his larger and most brilliant canvas, _Froment Jeune et Risler Aîné_--what do we more lastingly remember than the brief and sombre narrative of _Les Deux Auberges_?--a little piece that has no story at all; but a ‘situation’ depicted, and when depicted, _left_. There is an open country; leagues of Provence; a long stretching road; and, on the roadside, opposite each other, two inns. The older one is silent, melancholy; the other, noisy and prosperous. And the landlord of the older inn spends all his time in the newer; taking his pleasure there with guests who were once his own, and with a handsome landlady, who makes amends for his departed business. And in his own inn, opposite, a deserted woman sits solitary. That is all--but the art of the master! Now this particular instance of a pregnant brevity reminds me that in descriptions of landscape the very obligations of the short story are an advantage to its art. Nature, in Fiction, requires to be seen, not in endless detail, as a botanical or geographical study, but, as in Classic Landscape Composition, a noble glimpse of it, over a man’s shoulder, under a man’s arm. I know, of course, that is not the popular view. Blameless novels have owed their popularity to landscape written by the ream. Coaches have been named after them; steamboats have been named after them. I am not sure that, in their honour, inaccessible heights have not been scaled and virgin forests broken in upon, so that somewhere in picturesque districts the front of a gigantic hotel might have inscribed on it the title of a diffuse novel.