ations;
his experiences being made by his historian a vehicle of mostly virulent
and almost always worthless criticism on contemporaries. Perhaps the
most intolerable thing is the _affiche_ of idolatry for Baudelaire. One
remembers the glorious lines:

Et Charles Baudelaire
Dedaigneux du salaire.

He certainly might have been disdainful of the salary of the admiration
of one of the _farceurs_ of his own "Coucher du Soleil Romantique." But
on the whole there is a better way of taking leave of this first
Naturalist, and then mystic, and always _blagueur_. "Almost thou
persuadest me to be a Philistine." Which perhaps was his cryptic and
circuitous intention. Later M. Huysmans took to Black Arts; and at the
last he turned devout--a sort of sequence not by any means uncommon, and
one of the innumerable illustrations of the irony of things. Gautier and
others had anticipated and satirised all these stages in the Romantic
dawn; they reappeared, serious and dreary, in the twilight of the dusk.

[Sidenote: Belot and others.]

Adolphe Belot was not, strictly speaking, a Naturalist, for he was a
dozen years older than Zola, and ran up a huge list of novels ranging in
character between Naturalism and melodrama. His most famous book, _Mlle.
Giraud ma Femme_, was the most popular of a large number of attempts,
about the last third of the century, in the school of _La Religieuse_,
but with more or less deliberately pornographic effect. There is,
however, some power in this book, and the "curtain"--the foiled husband,
after Mlle. Giraud's death, seeing his she-rival swimming, swims out
after and drowns her--is quite refreshing. But I have always liked M.
Belot best for a thoughtful and delightful remark in _La Femme de Feu_.
"Heureuse elle-meme, elle trouva naturel de faire les autres heureux,"
which, translated into plain English, means that she was so happy with
her husband that she couldn't help making her lover happy. M. Belot did
not work out this modification of the Golden Rule--he was not a
philosophic novelist. But it is very humorous in itself, and the
extensions and applications of it are illimitable and vertiginous.[518]

Below him it is unnecessary to go.

FOOTNOTES:

[455] For the early divisions of verse and prose story were all Topsies,
and simply "growed"; although the smaller romances of the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth century, and the larger of the latter date, were
undoubtedly influenced by