one remaining. Now I have been almost as often
reproved for attaching too much value to style in others as for
attending too little to it myself. But I certainly could not give it
such a right to "reign alone." It will indeed "do" almost by itself; but
other things can "do" almost without it.

[322] To be absolutely candid, Dumas himself did sometimes ask more of
them than they could do; and then he failed. There can, I think, be
little doubt that this is the secret of the inadequacy (as at least it
seems to me) of the Felton episode. As a friend (whose thousand merits
strive to cover his one crime of not admiring Dumas quite enough), not
knowing that I had yet written a line of this chapter, but as it
happened just as I had reached the present point, wrote to me: "Think
what Sir Walter would have made of Felton!"

[323] I could myself be perfectly content to adapt George III. on a
certain _Apology_, and substitute for all this a simple "I do not think
Dumas needs any defence." But where there has been so much obloquy,
there should, perhaps, be some refutation.

[324] "And then he says, says he...."

[325] In modern novels, of course. You have some good talk in Homer and
also in the Sagas, but I am not thinking or speaking of them.

[326]

"Red ink for ornament and black for use--
The best of things are open to abuse."

(_The Good Clerk_ as vouched for by Charles Lamb.)

[327] Yet, being nothing if not critical, I can hardly agree with those
who talk of Dumas' "_wild_ imagination"! As the great Mr. Wordsworth was
more often made to mourn by the gratitude of men than by its opposite,
so I, in my humbler sphere, am more cast down sometimes by inapposite
praise than by ignorant blame.

CHAPTER IX

THE FRENCH NOVEL IN 1850

[Sidenote: The peculiarity of the moment.]

It was not found necessary, in the last volume, to suspend the current
of narrative or survey for the purpose of drawing interim conclusions in
special "Interchapters."[328] But the subjects of this present are so
much more bulky and varied, in proportion to the space available and the
time considered; while the fortunes of the novel itself altered so
prodigiously during that time, that something of the kind seemed to be
desirable, if not absolutely necessary. Moreover, the actual centre of
the century in France, or rather what may be called its precinct, the
political interregnum of 1848-1852, is more than a _mere_ pol