ace of
well-filled volumes. But these, as well as the single-volume but still
substantial _Un Homme Serieux_ and _Les Ailes d'Icare_, like _Gerfaut_
itself, could all, I think, be split up into shorter stories without
difficulty and with advantage. It is of course very likely that the
comparative slighting which the author has received from M. Brunetiere
and other French critics of the more theoretic kind is due to this. The
strict rule-system no doubt disapproves of the mere concatenation of
scenes--still more of the mere accumulation of them.

We, on the other hand, _quibus est nihil negatum_, or who at any rate
deny nothing to our favourite authors so long as they amuse or interest
us, ought to be--and some of the best as well as the not-best of us have
been--very fond of Charles de Bernard. How frankly and freely Thackeray
praised, translated, and adapted him ought to be known to everybody; and
indeed there was a great similarity between the two. The Frenchman had
nothing of Thackeray's strength--of his power of creating character; of
his intensity when he cared to be intense; of his satiric sweep and
"stoop"; of his spacious view and masterly grasp of life. But in some
ways he was a kind of Thackeray several degrees underproof--a small-beer
Thackeray that was a very excellent creature. In his grasp of a pure and
simple comic situation; in his faculty of carrying this out decently to
its appropriate end; and, above all, in the admirable quality of his
conversation, he was really a not so very minor edition of his great
English contemporary. Almost the only non-technical fault that can be
found with him--and it has been found by French as well as English
critics, so there is no room for dismissing the charge as due to a
merely insular cult of "good form"--is the extreme unscrupulousness of
some of his heroes, who appear to have no sense of honour at all. Yet,
in other ways, no French novelist of the century has obtained or
deserved more credit for drawing ladies and gentlemen. It has been
hinted that the inability to do this has been brought as a charge
against even the mighty Honore,[272] and that, here at any rate, it has
been found impossible to deny it absolutely. But if the company of the
Human Comedy falls short in this respect, it is not because some of its
members do "shady" things. It is because the indefinable, but to those
who can perceive it unmistakable, _aura_ of "gentility"--in the true and
not the deb