[204] In all the wide and splendid literature of French before the
nineteenth century only Rabelais and Moliere[205] can lay claim to it.
Romanticism brings humour in its train, as Classicism brings wit; but it
is curious how slow was the Romanticisation of French in this respect,
with one exception. There is no real humour in Hugo, Vigny, George Sand,
Balzac, scarcely even in Musset. Dumas, though showing decidedly good
gifts of possibility in his novels, does not usually require it there;
the absence of it in his dramas need hardly be dwelt on. Merimee, one
cannot but think, might have had it if he had chosen; but Merimee did
not choose to have so many things! If Gerard de Nerval's failure of a
great genius had failed in the comic instead of the romantic-tragical
direction, he would have had some too--in fact he had it in the
embryonic and unachieved fashion in which the author of _Gaspard de la
Nuit_, and Baudelaire, and Paul Verlaine have had it since in verse and
prose. But Gautier has it plump and plain, and without any help from the
strange counterfeiting fantasy of verse which sometimes confers it. He
has it always; at all times of his life; in the hackwork which made
abortion of so much greater literature, and in his actually great
literature, poems, novels, travels--what not. But he never has it more
strongly, vividly, and originally than in _Les Jeune-France_, a
coming-of-age book almost as old as _mil-huit-cent-trente_, written in
part no doubt in the immortal _gilet rouge_ itself, if only as kept for
study wear like Diderot's old dressing-gown.

There are two dangers lying in wait for the reader of the book. One is
the ordinary and quite respectable putting-out-of-the-lip at its
juvenile improprieties; the other, a little more subtle, is the notion
that the things, improper or not (and some of them are quite _not_), are
mere _juvenilia_--clever undergraduate work. The first requires no
special counterblast; the old monition, "Don't like it for its
impropriety, but also don't let its impropriety hide its merits from you
if it has any," will suffice. The other is, as has been said, more
insidious. I can only say that I have read much undergraduate or but
slightly post-graduate literature of many generations--before the day of
_Les Jeune-France_, about its date, between that day and my own season
of passing through those "sweet hours and the fleetest of time," and
since that season till the present moment. But