the whole of this. Any difference of it from the
normal French view will even help to explain my attitude in those parts
of this book (_e.g._ the remarks on Dumas _pere_) to which it does not
directly apply, as well as those (_e.g._ on Dumas _fils_) to which it
does.

The whole question seems to me to turn on the curiously different
estimates which different people make of what constitutes "humanity." To
cite another dictum of my friend the enemy, he, while, as I have said,
speaking with extraordinary kindness of my chapter on Rabelais in
itself, disallows it in a _History of the Novel_ because, among other
reasons, Panurge is not, or is very slightly, human. I should have said
that Panurge was as human as Hamlet, though certainly not so
_gentle_human.[345] I never met either; but I might do so, and I am
sure I should recognise both as men and brothers. Still, the comparison
here is of course somewhat rhetorical. Let us take Panurge with Laclos'
Valmont, whom, I think, my critic _does_ consider human; whom I am sure
I never have met and never shall meet, even if I should be so
unfortunate as to go to the place which (but, of course, for the
consolations of the Church) would have been his, _if_ he had been human;
and whom I never could in the most impossible event or _milieu_
recognise as anything but a synthetised specification. One may perhaps
dwell on this, for it is of immense importance to the general question.
Panurge and Valmont, comparatively considered, have beyond doubt points
in common. Both are extremely immoral, and both are--though the one only
sometimes, the other always--ill-natured. Neither is a fool, though the
one does, or is going to do, at least one very foolish thing with his
eyes open; while nothing that the other does--even his provocation of
Madame de Merteuil--can be said to be exactly "foolish." Both are
attempts to do what Thackeray said he attempted to do in most of the
characters of _Vanity Fair_--to draw people "living without God in the
world." Yet I can tolerate Panurge, and recognise him as human even when
he indirectly murders Dindenault, even when (which is worse) he behaves
so atrociously to the Lady of Paris; and I cannot tolerate or validate
Valmont even when he excogitates and puts in practice that very
ingenious and picturesque idea of a writing-desk, or when he seeks the
consolations and fortifications of the Church after Danceny has done on
him the first part of the judgment of