I cannot help feeling assured that the latest novelists without a story, whatever other merits they certainly have, are lacking in the power to create characters, to express a philosophy in action; and that the form which they have found, however valuable it may be, is the result of this failure, and not either a great refusal or a new vision.
5
The novel as Balzac conceived it has created the modern novel, but no modern novelist has followed, for none has been able to follow, Balzac on his own lines. Even those who have tried to follow him most closely have, sooner or later, branched off in one direction or another, most in the direction indicated by Stendhal. Stendhal has written one book which is a masterpiece, unique in its kind, Le Rouge et le Noir; a second, which is full of admirable things, Le Chartreuse de Parme; a book of profound criticism, Racine et Shakspeare; and a cold and penetrating study of the physiology of love, De l'Amour, by the side of which Balzac's Physiologie du
