Five Masters of French Romance

Excerpt from Five Masters of French Romance: Anatole France, Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget, Maurice Barre s, Romain Rolland
The French technique - Art for Art's sake - Fiction as a document on National Psychology.
A yellow-back novel on the parlour table of an English-speaking family is a diploma of culture and daring, with a faint, not unpleasant, aroma of wickedness. Modern French fiction is a byword for sparkling audacity: it is the champagne of literature. In case anyone should have been enticed to pick up this volume by the bad reputation of the French novel, I beg to give notice at the outset that these studies will be neither sparkling nor wicked: both distinctions transcend my ambition or my ability. For one thing, I have perused, almost at a stretch, between two and three hundred novels, not including short stories; and I can assure my readers that sparkling wickedness, in such high doses, carries with it its antidote.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."