go on
to forget all about it and accept the whole thing as the genuine outcome
of a man's experience which it purports to be. Add that it is all
entirely unsexual; that there is none with so poor an intelligence of the
heart as woman moves it; that the book does not exist in which the
relations between boy and girl are more miserably misrepresented than in
_Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_; that that picaresque ideal of romance
which, finding utterance in Hurtado de Mendoza, was presently to appeal
to such artists as Cervantes, Quevedo, Lesage, Smollett, the Dickens of
_Pickwick_, finds such expression in _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ as
nowhere else; and the tale of Borrow is complete enough.

Himself.

Despite or because of a habit of mystification which obliged him to
jumble together the homely Real and a not less homely Ideal, Lavengro
will always, I think, be found worthy of companionship, if only as the
one exemplary artist-tramp the race has yet achieved. The artist-tramp,
the tinker who can write, the horse-coper with a twang of Hamlet and a
habit of Monte-Cristo--that is George Borrow. For them that love these
differences there is none in whom they are so cunningly and quaintly
blended as George Borrow; and they that love them not may keep the other
side of the road and fare in peace elsewhither.

BALZAC

Under which King?

To Goethe it seemed that every one of Balzac's novels had been dug out of
a suffering woman's heart: but Goethe spoke not always wisely, and in
this exacting world there be some that not only have found fault with
Balzac's method and results but have dared to declare his theory of
society the dream of a mind diseased. To these critics Balzac was less
observer than creator: his views were false, his vision was distorted,
and though he had 'incomparable power' he had not power enough to make
them accept his work. This theory is English, and in France they find
Balzac possible enough. There is something of him in Pierre Dupont; he
made room for the work of Flaubert, Feydeau, the younger Dumas, Augier
and Zola and the brothers Goncourt; and to him Charles Baudelaire is as
some fat strange fungus to the wine-cask in whose leakings it springs.
Sainte-Beuve refused to accept him, but his 'Pigault-Lebrun des
duchesses' is only malicious: he resented the man's exuberant and
inordinate personality, and made haste to apply to it some drops of that
sugared vitriol of which h