ar Reims he kills, in a mere blind mellay, a boy officer
of barely fourteen, and is haunted by remorse ever afterwards.

A few days after telling the story he is shot by a _gamin_ whom older
men have made half-drunk and furnished with a pistol with directions to
do what he does. And all this is preserved from being merely sentimental
("Riccobonish," as I think Vigny himself--but it may be somebody
else--has it) by the touch of true melancholy on the one hand and of
all-saving irony on the other.

[Sidenote: The moral of the three.]

So also these two curious books save Vigny himself to some extent from
the condemnation, or at any rate the exceedingly faint praise, which his
principal novel may bring upon him as a novelist. But they do so to some
extent only. It is clear even from them, though not so clear as it is
from their more famous companion, that he was not to the manner born.
The riddles of the painful earth were far too much with him to permit
him to be an unembarrassed master or creator of pastime--not necessarily
horse-collar pastime by any means, but pastime pure and simple. His
preoccupations with philosophy, politics, world-sorrow, and other things
were constantly cropping up and getting in the way of his narrative
faculty. I do not know that, even of the scenes that I have praised, any
one except the expurgated Crebillonade of the King and the Lady and the
Doctor goes off with complete "currency," and this is an episode rather
than a whole tale, though it gives itself the half-title of _Histoire
d'une Puce Enragee_. He could never, I think, have done anything but
short stories; and even as a short-story teller he ranks with the other
Alfred, Musset, rather than with Merimee or Gautier. But, like Musset,
he presents us, as neither of the other two did (for Merimee was not a
poet, and Gautier was hardly a dramatist), with a writer, of mark all
but the greatest, in verse and prose and drama; while in prose and verse
at least he shows that quality of melancholy magnificence which has been
noted, as hardly any one else does in all three forms, except Hugo
himself.

* * * * *

NOTE ON FROMENTIN'S _DOMINIQUE_

[Sidenote: Note on Fromentin's _Dominique_: its altogether exceptional
character.]

I have found it rather difficult to determine the place most proper for
noticing the _Dominique_ of Eugene Fromentin--one of the most remarkable
"single-speech" novels in any literature