nd thereby put himself at once and for ever on the higher,
nay, highest level of literature, I do, after fifty years' study of the
thing and of endless other things, impenitently and impavidly affirm.

[Sidenote: Other short stories.]

What is more, in his shorter productions he was often not far below it,
save in respect of intensity. If I do not admire _Fortunio_ quite so
much as some people do, it is not so much because of its comparative
heartlessness--a thing rare in Gautier--as because for once, and I think
once only in pieces of its scale, the malt of the description _does_ get
above the meal of the personal interest, though that personal interest
exists. But _Jettatura_, with its combination of romantic and tragical
appeal; _Avatar_, with its extraordinary mixture of romance, again, with
humour, its "excitingness," and its delicacy of taste; the equally
extraordinary felicity of the dealings with that too often unmanageable
implement the "classical dictionary" in _Arria Marcella_, _Une Nuit de
Cleopatre_, and perhaps especially _Le Roi Candaule_; the tiny
sketches--half-_nouvelle_ and half-"middle" article--of _Le Pied de la
Momie_, _La Pipe d'Opium_, and _Le Club des Haschischins_,--what
marvellous consummateness in the various specifications and conditions
do these afford us!

Sometimes, however, I have thought that just as _La Morte Amoureuse_ is
almost or quite sufficient text for vindicating the greatness or
greaterness of "Theo," so his earliest book of prose fiction, _Les
Jeune-France_, will serve the same purpose for another side of him,
lesser if anybody likes, but exceptionally "complementary." In
particular it possesses a quality which up to his time was very rare in
France, has not been extraordinarily common there even since, and is
still, even in its ancestral home with ourselves, sometimes
inconceivably blundered about--the quality of Humour.[203]

[Sidenote: Gautier's humour--_Les Jeune-France_.]

For wit, France can, of course, challenge the world; nay, she can do
more, she can say to the world, "I have taught you this; and you are no
match for your teacher." But in Humour the case is notoriously altered.
None of the Latin nations, except Spain, the least purely Latin of them,
has ever achieved it, as the original or unoriginal Latins themselves
never did, with the exception of the lighter forms of it in Catullus, of
the grimmer in Lucretius--those greatest and most un-Roman of Roman
poets.