y fond. Its opening and
first published division, _Le Chateau de la Misere_, is one of the
finest pieces of description in the whole range of the French novel; and
there are many interesting scenes, especially the great duel of the hero
Sigognac with the bravo Lampourde. But some make it a reproach, not, I
think, of very damaging validity, that so much of the book is little
more than a "study off" the _Roman Comique_;[215] and it is, though not
exactly a reproach, a great misfortune that in time, kind, and almost
everything else it enters into competition with Dumas, whose gifts as a
manager of such things were as much above Gautier's as his powers as a
writer were below Theo's. _Le Roman de la Momie_, though possessing the
abiding talisman of style, suffers in the first place from being mere
Egyptology novelised, and in the second from the same thing having been
done, on a scale much better suited to the author, in _Le Pied de la
Momie_. Nor are _Spirite_ and _Militona_ free from parallel charges:
while _La Belle Jenny_--that single and unfortunate appeal to the
_abonne_ noted above--really may fail to amuse those who are not "irked
by the style."

[Sidenote: _Mlle. de Maupin._]

There remains the most notorious and the most abused of all Gautier's
work, _Mademoiselle de Maupin_. Perhaps here also, as in the case of _La
Morte Amoureuse_, I cannot do better than simply reprint, with very
slight addition, what I said of the book nearly forty years ago. For the
case is a peculiar one, and I have made no change in my own estimate,
though I think the inclusion of the _Preface_--not because I agree with
it any less--more dubious than I did then. In this _Preface_ the
doctrine of "art for art's sake" and of its consequent independence of
any _licet_ or _non-licet_ from morality is put with great ability and
no little cogency, but in a fashion essentially juvenile, from its want
of measure and its evident wish to provoke as much as to prove.[216]
Without it the book would probably have excited far less odium and
opprobrium than it has actually done; it would, if separate, be an
excellent critical essay on the general subject; while in its actual
position it almost subjects the text to the curse of purpose, from which
nothing which claims to be art ought (according to the doctrine of both
preface and book) to be more free.

With the novel itself it is difficult to deal in the way of abstract and
occasional excerpt, not merel