supply a fuller
explanation (the words apology or excuse are not really necessary) for
the space here allotted to its possessor. It comes, no doubt, in the
first place, from sheer and unanalysable narrative faculty, the secret
of the business, the mystery in one sense of the mystery in the other.
But it also comes, as it seems to me, from the fact that Paul de Kock is
the very first of French novelists who, though he has no closely woven
plot, no striking character, no vivid conversation or arresting phrases,
is thoroughly _real_, and in the good, not the bad, sense _quotidian_.
The statement may surprise some people and shock others, but I believe
it can be as fully sustained as that other statement about the most
different subject possible, the _Astree_, which was quoted from Madame
de Sevigne in the last volume. Paul knew the world he dealt with as well
almost as Dickens[56] knew his very different but somewhat corresponding
one; and, unlike Dickens, the Frenchman had the good sense to meddle
very little[57] with worlds that he did not know. Of course it would be
simply _bete_ to take it for granted that the majority of Parisian shop-
and work- and servant-girls have or had either the beauty or the
amiability or the less praiseworthy qualities of his grisettes. But
somehow or other one feels that the general _ethos_ of the class has
been caught.[58] His _bourgeois_ interiors and outings have the same
real and not merely stagy quality; though his melodramatic or pantomimic
endings may smack of "the boards" a little. The world to which he holds
up the mirror may be a rather vulgar sort of Vanity Fair, but there are
unfortunately few places more real than Vanity Fair, and few things less
unreal than vulgarity.

The last sentence may lead to a remark of a graver kind than has been
often indulged in here. Thackeray defined his own plan in _Vanity Fair_
itself as at least partly an attempt to show people "living without God
in the world." There certainly is not much godliness in the book, but he
could not keep it out altogether; he would have been false to nature
(which he never was) if he had. In Paul de Kock's extensive work, on the
other hand, the exclusion is complete. It is not that there is any
expressed Voltairianism as there is in Pigault. But though the people
are married in church as well as at the _mairie_, and I remember one
casual remark about a mother and her daughter going to mass, the whole
spiritual regio