l-justified, while Sir Walter is far from being a solitary sinner. I
must leave it to those who have given more study than I have to drama,
especially modern drama, to decide whether this had anything to do with
the fact that Dumas turned to the other kind. The main fact itself
admits, as far as my experience and opinion go, of absolutely no
dispute. Again and again, not merely in _Le Docteur Servans_ and _Le
Roman d'une Femme_, but in _La Dame aux Camelias_ itself, in _Tristan le
Roux_, in _Les Aventures de Quatre Femmes_, and in others still, I have
been, at first reading, on the point of dropping the book. But, owing to
the mere "triarian" habit of never giving up an appointed post, I have
been able to turn my defeat (and his, as it seemed to me) into a
victory, which no doubt I owe to him, but which has something of my own
in it too. His heroes very frequently disgust and his heroines do not
often delight me; I have "seen many others" than his baits of
voluptuousness; he does not amuse me like Crebillon; nor thrill me like
Prevost in the unique moment; nor interest me like his closest
successor, Feuillet. I cannot place his work, despite the excellence of
his mere writing, high as great literature. He is altogether on a lower
level than Flaubert or Maupassant; and one could not think of evening
him with Hugo in one way, with Balzac in another, with his own father in
a third, with Gautier or Merimee in a fourth. But he does, somehow or
other, manage that, in the evening time, there shall be such light as he
can give; and I am bound to acknowledge this as a triumph of craft, if
not of actual art. That while a gift and a remarkable one, it is rather
a dangerous gift for a novelist to rely on, needs little argument.

[Sidenote: _Contes et Nouvelles._]

The formally titled _Contes et Nouvelles_ do not contain very much of
the first interest. In the opening one there is a lady who, not perhaps
in the context quite tastefully, remarks that "Nous avons toutes notre
calvaire," her own Golgotha consisting of the duty of adjusting "the
extremist devotion" to her husband with "remembrance" (there was a good
deal to remember) of her lover "to her last heart-beat." To help her to
perform this self-immolation, she bids the lover leave her, refuses him,
and that repeatedly, permission to return, till, believing himself
utterly cast off, he makes up his mind to love a very nice girl whom his
parents want him to marry. _Then_ the sel