No man of letters ever had so great a measure of that gift as you; none gave of it more freely to all who came—­to the chance associate of the hour, as to the characters, all so burly and full-blooded, who flocked from your brain.  Thus it was that you failed when you approached the supernatural.  Your ghosts had too much flesh and blood, more than the living persons of feebler fancies.  A writer so fertile, so rapid, so masterly in the ease with which he worked, could not escape the reproaches of barren envy.  Because you overflowed with wit, you could not be ‘serious;’ Because you created with a word, you were said to scamp your work; because you were never dull, never pedantic, incapable of greed, you were to be censured as desultory, inaccurate, and prodigal.

A generation suffering from mental and physical anaemia—­a generation devoted to the ‘chiselled phrase,’ to accumulated ‘documents,’ to microscopic porings over human baseness, to minute and disgustful records of what in humanity is least human—­may readily bring these unregarded and railing accusations.  Like one of the great and good-humoured Giants of Rabelais, you may hear the murmurs from afar, and smile with disdain.  To you, who can amuse the world—­to you who offer it the fresh air of the highway, the battle-field, and the sea—­ the world must always return, escaping gladly from the boudoirs and the bouges, from the surgeries and hospitals, and dead rooms, of M. Daudet and M. Zola and of the wearisome De Goncourt.

With all your frankness, and with that queer morality of the Camp which, if it swallows a camel now and again, never strains at a gnat, how healthy and wholesome, and even pure, are your romances!  You never gloat over sin, nor dabble with an ugly curiosity in the corruptions of sense.  The passions in your tales are honourable and brave, the motives are clearly human.  Honour, Love, Friendship make the threefold cord, the clue your knights and dames follow through how delightful a labyrinth of adventures!  Your greatest books, I take the liberty to maintain, are the Cycle of the Valois (’La Reine Margot, ‘La Dame de Montsoreau,’ ’Les Quarante-cinq’), and the Cycle of Louis Treize and Louis Quatorze (’Les Trois Mousquetaires,’ ‘Vingt Ans Apre’s,’ ’Le Vicomte de Bragelonne’); and, beside these two trilogies—­a lonely monument, like the sphinx hard by the three pyramids—­’Monte Cristo.’

In these romances how easy it would have been for you to burn incense to that great goddess, Lubricity, whom our critic says your people worship.  You had Branto’me, you had Tallemant, you had Re’tif, and a dozen others, to furnish materials for scenes of voluptuousness and of blood that would have outdone even the present naturalistes.  From these alcoves of ‘Les Dames Galantes,’ and from the torture chambers (M.  Zola would not have spared us one starting sinew of brave La Mole on the rack) you turned, as Scott would have turned, without a