to the fact
that, in my journalist days, perhaps because I was a kind of abortion of
a barrister, I had to write endless articles on crimes.

Penge murders knew
The pencil blue

as regards my "copy," and a colleague once upbraided me for arguing in
favour of Mrs. Maybrick. But I had read crime-novels before those days,
and they never amused me. Yet perhaps it may be possible to show
cause--other than my personal likings--for not ranking these high.

[Sidenote: The first--his general character.]

I have somewhere seen it said that Ponson du Terrail, before he took to
driving _feuilletons_ five-in-hand, showed some power of less coarse
fiction-writing on a smaller scale. But I have not seen any of these
essays, and real success in them on his part would surprise me. For it
is exactly in the qualities necessary to such a success that he seems to
me to come short. He _did_ possess what, though it may seem almost
profane to call it imagination, is really a cheap and drossy lower kind
thereof. He could frame and accumulate, even to some extent connect,
melodramatic situations, not so very badly, and not in very glaring
imitation of anybody else. But, perhaps for that very reason, the
difference between him and the others strikes one all the more
painfully. _Les Orphelins de la Saint-Barthelemy_ awakes the saddest
sighs for Dumas or Merimee. _La Femme Immortelle_, with its _diablerie_
explained and then _dis_-explained and then clumsily solved with a
laugh, makes one wish for an hour or two even of Soulie. And when one
comes to the nineteenth century and _Les Gandins_ and a fiendish
_docteur rouge_[430] (who is in every conceivable way inferior to
Vigny's _docteur noir_), and a wicked count who undergoes a spotty
transcorporation, it is worse. If any one says, "This is possible, but
you yourself have said that excellence in some one else ought not to
affect the estimate of the actual subject," I reply, "Granted; but
Ponson du Terrail bores me." I have dropped every book of his that I
have taken up, and only at a second--even a third--struggle have been
able to get knowledge enough of it to speak without critical treason.
Moreover, his style (always under caution given) seems to me flat,
savourless, and commonplace; his thought childish, his etceteras (if I
may so say) absurd. The very printing is an irritation. Who can read
such stuff as this?

Tout a coup une sonnette se fit entendre.

Nana se leva.