finitely less tragic effect than Romeo. There is one scene in which he
is represented as gathering all his enemies together (including a
lawyer, who is half-rogue, half-dupe) and putting them all to confusion
by his oratory. The worst of it is that one does not in the least see
_why_ they were confused, except in one case, where the foe is literally
kicked downstairs--an effective method, and one rare enough in French
novels up to this date to be worth notice.[434]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Droz.]

It was, for all contemporary readers of the French novel, except those
of the gravest and most precise kind, a day to be marked, not with
vanishing forms in chalk, but with alabaster or Parian, when "Marcellin"
of the _Vie Parisienne_--one of those remarkable editors who, without
ever writing themselves, seem to have the knack of attracting and almost
creating writers, enlisted one "Z," the actual final letter of the name
of Gustave Droz, and published the first article of those to be later
collected as _Monsieur, Madame et Bebe_ and _Entre Nous_. Although the
contents of these books only added a fresh sprout to the age-old tree
that, for more than half a millennium, had borne _fabliau_ and
_nouvelle_ and _conte_ and _histoire_, and so forth, they had a
remarkable, if not easily definable, differentia of their own, and have
influenced fiction-writing of the same kind for a good half-century
since. The later-working "Gyp" and others owed a good deal to them; and
I am bound to say that--reading the two books recently after a long
interval--I found my old favourites just as amusing as I found them the
very first time, shortly after they came out.

Of course--and only those who have made much study of criticism know how
seldom critics recognise this "of course"--you must take the things in,
and not out of, their own class. They are not bread, or meat, or milk of
literature. They are, to take one order of gastronomic preference and
taste, devilled biscuits; to take another, chocolate with whipped cream
on it. And the devilling and the creaming are sometimes better than the
chocolate and the biscuit.

[Sidenote: _Mr., Mme. et Bebe_ and _Entre Nous_.]

It is not very easy to say--and perhaps not very important to
know--whether the mixture of naughtiness and sentimentality which
characterises these books[435] was what Mr. Carlyle, I think, was first
to call an "insurance" or only a spontaneous and in