), which contains the
author's literary creed, refined and castigated by years of practice
from the cruder form which he had already promulgated in the Preface to
Flaubert's _Correspondence with George Sand_. It extols the "objective"
as against the psychological method of novel-writing, but directs itself
most strongly against the older romance of plot, and places the
excellence of the novelist in the complete and vivid projection of that
novelist's own particular "illusion" of the world, yet so as to present
events and characters in the most actual manner. But, as promised, we
shall return to it.

[Sidenote: _Bel-Ami._]

To run through the actual "turn-out" in novel[484] and tale as far as is
possible here, _Bel-Ami_ started, in England at least, with the most
favouring gales possible. It was just when the decree had gone forth,
issued by the younger Later Victorians, that all the world should be
made naughty; that the insipid whiteness of their Early and Middle
elders should be washed black and scarlet, and especially "blue"; and
that if possible, by this and other processes, something like real
literature might be made to take the place of the drivellings and
botcheries of Tennyson and Browning; of Dickens and Thackeray; of Ruskin
and Carlyle. To these persons _Bel-Ami_ was a sweet content, a really
"_shady_ boon." The hero never does a decent thing and never says a good
one; but he has good looks and insinuating manners of the kind that
please some women, whence his name, originally given to him by an
innocent little girl, and taken up by her by no means innocent mamma and
other quasi-ladies.[485] He starts as a soldier who has served his time
in Algeria, but has found nothing better to do than a subordinate post
in a railway office. He meets a former comrade who is high up in Paris
journalism, and who very amiably introduces Georges Duroy to that bad
resting-place but promising passageway. Duroy succeeds, not so much
(though he is not a fool) by any brains as by impudence; by a faculty of
making use of others; by one of the farce-duels in which combatants are
put half a mile off each other to fire _once_, etc.; but most of all by
his belamyship (for the word is good old English in a better sense). The
women of the book are what is familiarly called "a caution." They revive
the old Helisenne de Crenne[486] "sensual appetite" for the handsome
bounder; and though of course jealous of his infidelities, are quite
rea