arouse mild or not mild complaints of
inadequacy. And it must be clear, from what has been already said, that
some critic may very likely exclaim, in reference to any selected piece,
"Why, this is neither a novel nor a romance, nor even in any
legitimate sense a tale!" The inestimable rejoinder already
quoted,[240]--episcopal, and dignifying even that order though it was
made only by a bishop _in partibus_--is the only one here.

[Sidenote: _La Boheme Galante_, _Les Filles du Feu_, and _Le Reve et la
Vie_.]

The difficulty of discussing or illustrating, in short space and due
proportion, the novel or _roman_ element in such a writer must be
sufficiently obvious. His longer travels in Germany and the East are
steeped in this element; and the shorter compositions which bear names
of novel-character are often "little travels" in his native province,
the Isle of France, and that larger _banlieue_ of Paris, towards Picardy
and Flanders, which our Seventy Thousand saved, by dying, the other day.
But it is impossible--and might even, if possible, be superfluous--to
touch the first group. Of the second there are three subdivisions,
which, however, are represented with not inconsiderable variation in
different issues.[241] Their titles are _La Boheme Galante_, _Les Filles
du Feu_, and _Le Reve et la Vie_, the last of which contains only one
section, _Aurelia_, never, if I do not mistake, revised by Gerard
himself, and only published after his most tragic death. Its
_supra_-title really describes the most characteristic part or feature
of all the three and of Gerard's whole work.

[Sidenote: Their general character.]

To one who always lived, as Paul de Saint-Victor put it in one of the
best of those curious exercises of his mastery over words, "in the
fringes[242] of the actual world," this confusion of place and no
place, this inextricable blending of fact and dream, imagination and
reality, was natural enough; and no one but a Philistine will find fault
with the sometimes apparently mechanical and Sternian transitions which
form part of its expression. There was, indeed, an inevitable
_mixedness_ in that strange nature of his; and he will pass from almost
"true Dickens" (he actually admits inspiration from him) in accounts of
the Paris _Halles_, or of country towns, to De Quinceyish passages, free
from that slight touch of _apparatus_ which is undeniable now and then
in the Opium Eater. Here are longish excursions of pure