sters, had endowed him with a style of
the most extraordinary sobriety and accuracy--the style of a more
scholarly, reticent, and tightly-girt Defoe. It is not merely that his
vision, and his capacity of reproducing that vision, were unsurpassed
and rarely equalled for sharpness of outline and perfection of
disengagement. He had something else which it is much less easy to put
into words--the power of treating an incident or a character (character,
it is true, less often and less fully than incident) as if it were a
phrase or a landscape, of separating it, carving it out (so to speak),
and presenting it isolated and framed for survey. His performances in
these tracks are so numerous that it is difficult to single out any. But
I do not know that finer examples (besides those noticed above in _Une
Vie_) of his power of thus isolating and projecting a scene are to be
found than two of the passages in _Pierre et Jean_, the prawn-catching
party and Pierre's meditation at the jetty-head. Of his similar but
greater faculty of treating incident _and_ character _Monsieur Parent_
is perhaps the very finest example (for _Boule de Suif_ is something
greater than a mere slice), though _Promenade_, _Les Soeurs Rondoli_,
_Boitelle_, _Deux Amis_, and others are almost as good. But this very
excellence of our author's carries with it a danger which most of his
readers must have recognised. His definition and vignetting of separate
scenes, incidents, and characters is so sharp and complete that he finds
a difficulty in combining them. The attempt to disdain and depreciate
plot which the above-mentioned Preface contains is, I suspect (though I
am, as often confessed, no plot-worshipper), as our disdains and
depreciations so often are, itself a confession. At any rate, it is
allowed that the longer books, with the exception of _Pierre et Jean_
(which was for that very reason, and perhaps for others, disdained by
the youngest and most impressionist school of critics), are deficient in
beginning, middle, and end. _Une Vie_ and _Bel-Ami_ are surveys or
chronicles, not dramas or histories. _Mont-Oriol_, open enough to
objection in some ways, is rather better in this point. _Fort Comme la
Mort_ relapses under the old curse of the situation of teasing
unhappiness from which there is no outlet, and in which there is little
action. _Notre Coeur_ should perhaps escape criticism on this head, as
the shadow of the author's fate was already heavy on him