The Flaubert school or group lasted sufficiently long in France, though, after the late War, its influence was completely washed out by a sort of eclecticism whose main features it is very difficult to trace and into whose ramifications I do not intend to enter, for it has had practically no time to influence the work of Anglo-Saxon novel writers. Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev, the Gourmonts, Daudet, and the rest of those who had their places at Brébant’s died in their allotted years, the last survivor of any prominence being Anatole France, whose death was greeted by an outburst of furious hatred in France such as can seldom have greeted the passing of a distinguished figure. That was because the French young, saddened and rendered starving by the War which just preceded France’s death, turned with loathing from the rather _débonnaire_ aloofness of the author of _Histoire Comique_. And indeed if we Anglo-Saxons had suffered in the least as much as those Latins I might well expect to find myself lynched for writing what I have done above. I have seldom witnessed anything to equal the dismay of a great French gathering of _littérateurs_ when their honoured guest, an English novelist of distinction and indeed of internationally public literary functions, told them in quite immaculate French that all he knew of writing he had from France, and that all that he had from France he had learned from the works of Guy de Maupassant! If he had gone round that great assembly and had, with his glove, flicked each one of the guests in the face, he could not have caused greater consternation. Nevertheless it is true that Maupassant must have had more influence on the Anglo-Saxon writer of to-day than any other writer of fiction, Henry James possibly excepted. In England, meantime, slightly before the 1890’s, the solid vogue of--or the somnolent rumination over--the three-volumed nuvvle of commerce had been seriously threatened by the slow spread of the idea that writing might be an art, by a tremendous drop in the prices at which books might be sold and by revolutionary attacks on Victorian conventional morality. The loosening in morality need not concern us except in so far as it shook the idea that the novelist must of necessity colour all his characters with one or other hue, but the drop in the price of books facilitated at least all sorts of experimental adventures. Whilst the nuvvle remained a thirty-shilling three-decker publishers must needs play for safety whether in morals or methods and neither, say, the _Hill-top_ novels of Grant Allen, which were pseudo-scientific attacks on conventional morality, nor yet _Almayer’s Folly_, which was an attempt to introduce the artistic standards and methods of Flaubert into Anglo-Saxondom, could have had even the remotest chance of publication had the novel remained at its former price.