The law should certainly be tested, just as it was tested
in France by the prosecution of Flaubert in 1857, but we know perfectly
well that even a victory for sincerity would do no more than carry us a
little nearer to our goal. The law is a trifle compared with public
feeling, and public feeling is a trifle beside the emotions the public
is told it ought to feel. We had best reconcile ourselves to the
inevitable, admit that we cannot be sincere because the police dare not
allow it, and acquit the libraries of this one sin, that they killed in
English literature a sincerity which was not there.

Three Comic Giants

1. TARTARIN

It is not every country and every period gives birth to a comic giant.
Tragic and sentimental heroes are common, and make upon the history of
literature a mark of sorts; we have Achilles and Werther, William Tell,
d'Artagnan, Tristan, Sir Galahad, others, too, with equal claims to
fame: but comic giants are few. The literature of the world is full of
comic pigmies; it is fairly rich in half-growns such as Eulenspiegel, Mr
Dooley, Tchitchikoff, and Mr Pickwick, but it does not easily produce
the comic character who stands alone and massive among his fellows, like
Balzac among novelists. There are not half a dozen competitors for the
position, for Pantagruel and Gargantua are too philosophic, while Don
Quixote does not move every reader to laughter; he is too romantic, too
noble; he is hardly comic. Baron von Muenchausen, Falstaff, and Tartarin
alone remain face to face, all of them simple, all of them adventurous,
but adventurous without literary inflation, as a kitten is adventurous
when it explores a work-basket. There is no gigantic quality where there
is self-consciousness or cynicism; the slightest strain causes the
gigantic to vanish, the creature becomes human. The comic giant must be
obvious, he must be, to himself, rebellious to analysis; he must also be
obvious to the beholder, indeed transparent. That is not a paradox, it
is a restatement of the fact that the comic giant's simplicity must be
so great that everybody but he will realise it.

All this Tartarin fulfils. He is the creature of Alphonse Daudet, a
second-rate writer who has earned for him a title maybe to immortality.
There is no doubt that Daudet was a second-rate writer, and that Mr
George Moore was right when he summed him up as _de la bouillabaisse_;
his novels are sentimental, his reminiscences turgid, his verse