an; but as a novel-hero
the Gascon seems to me to "fill all numbers." Cinq-Mars may be a
succession or chain of type-personages--generous but headlong youth,
spoilt favourite, conspirator and something like traitor, finally
victim; but these are the "flat" characters (if one may so speak) of the
treatise, not the "round" ones of the novel. And I cannot _unite_ them.
His love-affair with Marie de Gonzague leaves me cold. His friend, the
younger De Thou, is hardly more than "an excellent person." The
persecution of Urbain Grandier and the sufferings of the Ursuline Abbess
seem to me--to use the old schoolboy word--to be hopelessly "muffed";
and if any one will compare the accounts of the taking of the
"Spanish bastion" at Perpignan with the exploit at that other
bastion--Saint-Gervais at Rochelle--he will see what I mean as well as
in any single instance. The second part, where we come to the actual
conspiracy, is rather better than the first, if not much; and I think
Vigny's presentment of Richelieu has been too much censured. Armand
Duplessis was a very great man; but unless you accept the older
Machiavellian and the more modern German doctrines as to what a great
man may do, he must also be pronounced a most unscrupulous one; while
there is little doubt (unless you go back to Louis XI.) that Vigny was
right in regarding him as the original begetter of the French
Revolution. But he is not here made by any means wholly inhuman, and
Vigny makes it justly clear that, if he had not killed Cinq-Mars,
Cinq-Mars would have killed him. In such cases of course the person who
begins may be regarded as the assassin; but it is doubtful whether this
is distributive justice of the highest order. And I do not see much
salvation for France in Henry d'Effiat.

This, however, is a digression from our proper subject, but one
justifying itself after a fashion, inasmuch as it results from Vigny's
own faulty handling of the subject itself and is appropriate to his line
of argument in his _Examen_. He has written the novel not as he ought
and as he ought not. The political and historical interests overshadow,
confuse, and hamper the purely "fictional" (as people say now), and when
he has got hold of a scene which _is_ either purely "fictional," or
historical with fictitious possibilities, he does not seem (to me) to
know how to deal with it. There is one--of the extremest melodramatic
character and opportunities--where, in a hut perched on th