Note 877 — Chapter I · THE SUCCESSORS OF SAINTE-BEUVE.

Two such different persons and writers as Zola himself and M. Anatole France have, in different parts of the Mémoires des Goncourt, given true and valuable testimony to one of the great merits of that much-abused and certainly much-abusable thing journalism—the facility and audacity, namely, which it confers. No doubt the facility which it gives may turn to slovenliness, and the boldness in attempting great tasks to levity: but this need not be so,—M. France himself is a convincing evidence in the one case at least. And there is no doubt that the practised habit of undertaking complicated things at short notice, and of doing the “day’s darg” in the day, protects a man from that “impossibility of getting ready,” that “not knowing how to begin” (and still less how to finish), which has sterilised even genius so frequently.