ted and evaded and sanctified by the embrace and the
euthanasia of the sea. Perhaps it is poetry rather than novel or even
romance--in substance it is too abstract and elemental for either of the
less majestical branches of inventive literature. But it is great. "By
God! 'tis good," and, to lengthen somewhat Ben's famous challenge, "if
you like, you may" put it with, and not so far from, in whatever order
you please--the deaths of Cleopatra and of Colonel Newcome.

The book is therefore a success; but that success is an evident _tour de
force_, and it is nearly as evident to any student of the subject that
such a _tour de force_ was not likely to be repeated, and that the thing
owed its actual salvage to a rather strict limitation of subject and
treatment--a limitation hitherto unknown in the writer and itself
unlikely to recur. Also that there were certain things in it--especially
the travesties of names and subjects of which the author practically
knew nothing--the repetition and extension of which _was_ likely to be
damaging, if not fatal. In two or three years the "fatality" of which
Victor Hugo himself was dangerously fond of talking (the warning of
Herodotus in the dawn about things which it is not lawful to mention
has been too often neglected) had its revenge.

[Sidenote: _L'Homme Qui Rit._]

_L'Homme Qui Rit_ is probably the maddest book in recognised literature;
certainly the maddest written by an author of supreme genius without the
faintest notion that he was making himself ridiculous. The genius is
still there, and passage on passage shows us the real "prose-poetry,"
that is to say, the prose which ought to have been written in verse. The
scheme of the quartette--Ursus, the misanthrope-Good-Samaritan; Homo,
the amiable wolf; Gwynplaine, the tortured and guiltless child and
youth; Dea, the adorable maiden--is unexceptionable _per se_, and it
could have been worked out in verse or drama perfectly, though the
actual termination--Gwynplaine's suicide in the sea after Dea's
death--is perhaps too close and too easy a "variation of the same thing"
on Gilliatt's parallel self-immolation after Deruchette's marriage.[112]
Not a few opening or episodic parts--the picture of the caravan; the
struggle of the child Gwynplaine with the elements to save not so much
himself as the baby Dea; the revulsions of his temptations and
persecutions later; and yet others[113]--show the poet and the master.

But the way in which t