inclined to follow the swift methods proper enough on the stage, if not
absolutely necessary there, instead of developing for themselves the
more leisurely movement appropriate to prose-fiction. Both Fielding and
Le Sage, it may be well to note, had profited greatly by their careful
study of Molière and of his logical method of presenting character. In
the 'Princess of Cleves,'--perhaps the first effort at feminine
psychology in fiction,--we discover the obvious impress of both
Corneille and Racine on Madame de Lafayette,--the stiffening of the will
to resolute self-sacrifice of the elder dramatist and the subtler
analysis of motive dexterously attempted by the younger and more tender
tragic poet.

Just as Beaumarchais in the eighteenth century found his profit in a
study of Le Sage's satiric attitude, so Augier in the nineteenth
century, and still more, Dumas _fils_, responded to the sharp stimulus
of Balzac. The richer and far more complicated presentation of character
which delights and amazes us in the 'Human Comedy' was most suggestive
to the younger generation of French dramatists; and no one can fail to
see the reflection of Balzac in the 'Maître Guérin' of Augier and in the
'Ami des femmes' of Dumas. And, in their turn, these plays and their
fellows supplied a pattern to the novelist--to Daudet especially. A
certain lack of largeness, a certain artificiality of action in Daudet's
'Fromont jeune et Risler aîné,' is probably to be ascribed to the fact
that the story was first conceived in the form of a play, altho it was
actually written as a novel.

The British novelist with whom this French novelist is often compared,
and with whom he had much in common, was also impressed profoundly by
the theater of his own time and of his own country. But Dickens was less
fortunate than Daudet, in that the contemporary English stage did not