point the reader who does not raise
his expectation too high. _Olivier Maugant_ is perhaps the strongest.
But the expression just used must not be taken as belittling. In both
France and England such novel-writing had become almost a
trade--certainly a profession: and the turning out of workmanlike and
fairly satisfying articles for daily consumption is, if not a noble
ambition, a quite respectable aim. M. Cherbuliez did something more than
this: there are numerous scenes and situations in his work which do not
merely interest, but excite, if they never exactly transport. And the
provision of interest itself is, as has been allowed, remarkably
bounteous. I should not despise, though I should be a little sorry for,
a reader--especially an English reader--who found more of it in
Cherbuliez than even in Feuillet, and much more than in Flaubert or
Maupassant. The causes of such preference require no extensive
indication, and I need not say, after or before what is said elsewhere,
that this order of estimate is not mine. But it is to some extent a
"fact in the case."[437]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Three eccentrics.]

Before finishing this chapter we ought, perhaps, to consider three odd
persons, two of them much extolled by some--Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly,
Leon Cladel, and "Champfleury" of _Les Excentriques_. The two first were
themselves emphatically "eccentrics"--one an apostle of dandyism (he
actually wrote a book about Brummel, whom he had met early), a
disdainful critic of rather untrustworthy vigour, and a stalwart
reactionary to Catholicism and Royalism; the other a devotee of the
exact opposite of dandyism, as the title of his best-known book, _Les
Va-nu-pieds_, shows, and a Republican to the point of admiring the
Commune. The opposition has at least the advantage of disproving
prejudice, in any unfavourable remarks that may be made about either. To
Barbey d'Aurevilly's criticism I have endeavoured to do justice in a
more appropriate place than this.[438] His fiction occupied a much
smaller, but not a small, proportion of his very voluminous work. _Les
Diaboliques_ and _L'Ensorcelee_, as well as _Les Va-nu-pieds_, are
titles which entitle a reader to form certain more or less definite
expectations about the books they label; and an author, by choosing
them, deprives himself, to some extent, of the right justly claimed for
him in Victor Hugo's well-known manifesto, to be judged _merely_