So it happened that in France from, say, the ’fifties to the early ’nineties of the last century, you had a place of dignity found for the hitherto despised Novel--and in consequence you very speedily found an accepted convention. For once an occupation is discovered to be dignified you will very soon find that investigators of methods are at work upon it. The game of marbles was, in my hey-day, regarded as an occupation solely for little boys; but with the institution some few years ago of an international championship it came in for the most serious of study by grown men, and the photographs of last year’s world-contest that a little time ago filled the public prints, showed the competitors to be white-headed, grey-bearded, or very rotund of figure. The champion was eventually found, as far as I can remember, in a gentleman of sixty and over. So with _Le Rouge et le Noir_ it became evident to the world that the novel of discussion or of investigation was a possibility and, with that discovery, the great novels began to come. The discussions to be found in the very few works of fiction by Diderot were naturally experimental and amateurish. Like Richardson he was tremendously on the side of the more or less patriarchal and civic angels. Nevertheless, he could give you a parasite talking in favour of his profession or a rogue justifying his courses with a sincerity and a reasonable ingenuousness that differed extremely from the exaggerated speeches of the villains of the Fielding, the Dickens, or the commercial, nuvvle. Stendhal, on the other hand, being what one might call a cold Nietzschean--or it might be more just to say that Nietzsche was a warmed-up Stendhalean--Stendhal, then, swung the balance rather to the other extreme, tending to make his detrimentals argumentatively masterly and his conventionally virtuous characters banal and impotent. At any rate, with or after Stendhal, it became evident that, if the novel was to have what is called _vraisemblance_, if it was so to render life as to engross its reader, the novelist must not take sides either with the virtuous whose virtues cause them to prosper or with the vicious whose very virtues drive them always nearer and nearer to the gallows or the pauper’s grave. That does not say that the author need abstain from letting his conventionally virtuous characters prosper to any thinkable extent. For however scientifically the matter be considered, material if not intellectual honesty, sobriety, continence, frugality, parsimony, and the other material virtues will give any man a better chance of fourteen thousand--pounds or dollars--a year than if he should be, however intellectually honest, financially unsound, or a drunkard or a dreamer or one who never talks about the baths he takes. The publisher, in fact, has a better chance of both terrestrial and skyey mansions than the novelist.