highest degree as a novelist. Taking in the others which have been
surveyed, we must also acknowledge in the author an unusually wide range
and a great display of faculty--even of faculties--almost all over that
range, though perhaps in no other case than the two selected has he
thoroughly mastered and firmly held the ground which he has attempted to
win. If he has not--if _Tristan le Roux_ is, on the whole, only a
second- or third-rate historical romance; _Trois Hommes Forts_ a fair
and competent, but not thrilling melodrama, and so on, and so on--it is
no doubt partly, to speak with the sometimes useful as well as engaging
irrationality of childhood, "because he couldn't." But I think it is
also because of something that can be explained. It was because he was
far too prone to theorise about men and women and to make his books
attempted demonstrations, or at least illustrations, of his theories.
Now, to theorise about men is seldom very satisfactory; but to theorise
about women is to weigh gossamer and measure moonbeams. The very wisest
thing ever said about them is said in the old English couplet:

Some be lewd, and some be shrewd,
_But all they be not so_,

and I think that our fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century _vates_
showed his wisdom most in sticking to the strict negative in his
exculpatory second line, here italicised.

Now if Alexander the Younger does not absolutely insist that "all they
_be_ so," he goes very near to it, excepting only characters of
insignificant domesticity. When he does give you an "honnete femme" who
is not merely this, such as the Clementine of the _Roman d'une Femme_ or
the Marceline of _Diane de Lys_, he gives them some queer touches. His
"_shady_ Magdalenes" (with apologies to one of the best of parodies for
spoiling its double rhyme) and his even more shady, because more
inexcusable, _marquises_; his adorable innocents, who let their
innocence vanish "in the heat of the moment" (as the late Mr. Samuel
Morley said when he forgot that Mr. Bradlaugh was an atheist), because
the husbands pay too much attention to politics; and his affectionate
wives, like the Lady in _Therese_,[388] who supply their missing
husbands' place just for once, and forget all about it--these _might_ be
individually creatures of fact, but as a class they _are_ creatures of
theory. And theory never made a good novel yet: it is lucky if it has
sometimes, but too rarely, failed to make a good in