hom I should have thought quite
unshockable, either by principles or practice, once professed himself to
me aghast at _Mephistophela_. But M. Mendes's improprieties neither
shock nor excite nor amuse me, because they have a certain air of being
"machined." If anybody wishes to sample them at their very best, the
half-score loosely and largely printed pages of "Tourterelle" in the
volume entitled _Lesbia_ will be no severe experiment. He may then take
his choice of not going further at all, or of going further at the
hazard of faring worse, or as well now and then, but hardly, I think,
better.

* * * * *

I do not propose to add any further studies in detail to those already
presented in this chapter. As I have (perhaps more than once) remarked,
there are few periods of the century with the minor as well as major
novel work of which I am better acquainted than with that of its last
quarter. As I remember independently, or am in this or that way
reminded, of the names of Jules de Glouvet; of at least three
Pauls--Alexis, Arene, and Mahalin; of Ernest d'Hervilly; of the prolific
Hector Malot; of Oscar Metenier, and Octave Mirbeau, and Jules Valles of
the Commune, of the brothers Margueritte and of others too many to
mention, a sort of shame invades me at leaving them out.[557] Some of
them may be alive still, though most, I think, are dead. But dead or
alive, I have no room for them, and, for reasons also elsewhere stated,
it is perhaps as well. The blossoming of the aloe, not once in a hundred
years but all through them, has been told as best I could tell it.

Not shame but sorrow attends the exclusion of others, some of them, I
think, better novelists than those actually discussed in this
chapter--especially "Gyp" and MM. Anatole France, Paul Bourget, Jean
Richepin, and "Pierre Loti." It would have been agreeable to pay, once
more, suit and service to the adorable chronicler of the little rascal
Bob and the unpretentiously divine Chiffon; to recall the delighted
surprise with which one read _Le Crime de Silvestre Bonnard_, and follow
the train of triumphs that succeeded it; to do justice (unbribed, but
pleasantly seasoned, by some private gratitude) to the vigour and
acuteness of _L'Irreparable_ and its companions; to salute that
masterpiece of Realism at its best, _La Glu_, and the more complicated
as well as more pathetic history of _Cesarine_; and to re-discover the
countries and the