The amateurs of cosmopolitan literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal and Michelet.

They praise the former for his delicate and pitiless psychological analysis.

It had been anticipated a dozen years, nay, nearly twenty years, before he saw the Beresina: and was being given out in print at about the very moment of that uncomfortable experience, and before he himself published anything, by a young English lady--a lady if ever there was one and English if any person ever was--in a country parsonage in Hampshire or in hired houses, quite humdrum and commonplace to the commonplace and humdrum imagination, at Bath and Southampton.
They praise Michelet for his enthusiastic and multiform apprehension of the plastic reality of the past, his re-creation of it, his putting of it, live and active, before the present.

The thing had been done, twenty years earlier again, by a Scotch advocate who had deliberately turned from poetic form, though he retained poetic imagination, and who did not disdain not to make a fool of himself, as Michelet, with all his genius, did again and again.

Of all the essentials of the two manners of fictitious creation--Michelet's was not fictitious, but he almost made it so, and Stendhal's was not historical, but he almost made it so likewise--Scott and Miss Austen had set the types, given the methods, arranged the processes as definitely as Fust, or Coster, or Gutenberg, or Fust's friend Mephistopheles--who perhaps, on the whole, has the best title to the invention--did in another matter three hundred years before.
That Scott's variety should be taken up first, and should for a time have the great popularity, the greater number of disciples, the greater acceptance as a mode of pleasing--was, as has been pointed out, natural enough; it is not a little significant that (to avert our eyes from England) the next practitioner of the psychological style in European literature, Balzac, went through a long and mostly unsuccessful probation in the other kind, and never wholly deserted it, or at least always kept looking back to it.