Octave
Feuillet not yet come to his prime), have something of the ordinary
nineteenth-century novel--not of the best kind.

But in all these and many more it is simply a case of "Not here!" though
in the historical examples, before Saint Bartholomew and after
Sainte-Guillotine, the sentence may be mitigated to "Not here
_consummately_." And it may be just, though only just, necessary to say
that this examination of Dumas' qualities should itself, with very
little application or moral, settle the question whether he is a mere
circulating-library caterer or a producer of real literature.

[Sidenote: The worthier--treatment of them not so much individually as
under heads.]

To give brief specifications of books and passages in the novels
mentioned above, in groups or individually, may seem open to the
objections often made to a mere catalogue of likes and dislikes. But,
after all, in the estimation of aesthetic matters, it _is_ likes and
dislikes that count. Nowhere, and perhaps in this case less than
anywhere else, can the critic or the historian pretend to dispense his
readers from actual perusal; it is sufficient, but it is at the same
time necessary, that he should prepare those who have not read and
remind those who have. For champion specimen-pieces, satisfying, not
merely in parts but as wholes, the claim that Dumas shall be regarded as
an absolute master in his own craft and in his own particular division
of it, the present writer must still select, after fifty years' reading
and re-reading, _Vingt Ans Apres_ and _La Reine Margot_. Parts of _Les
Trois Mousquetaires_ are unsurpassed and unsurpassable; but the
Bonacieux love-affair is inadequate and intruded, and I have never
thought Milady's seduction of Felton quite "brought off." In _Le Vicomte
de Bragelonne_ this inequality becomes much more manifest. Nothing,
again, can surpass the single-handed achievement of D'Artagnan at the
beginning in his kidnapping of General Monk, and few things his failure
at the end to save Porthos, with the death of the latter--a thing which
has hardly a superior throughout the whole range of the novel in
whatever language (so far as I know) it has been written. But the "young
men" were allowed their heads, by far too frequently and for too long
periods, in the middle;[317] and these heads were by no means always
equal to the occasion. There is no such declension in the immediate
followers of _La Reine Margot_, _La Dame de Monsorea