and Pamphlets, I think nearly as much must be granted; and
I need not repeat what has been said above on the other side. The
charity "puff" of _Les Madeleines Repenties_ is an admirable piece of
rhetoric not seldom reaching eloquence; and it has the not unliterary
side-interest of suggesting the question whether its ironic treatment of
the general estimate of the author as Historiographer Royal to the venal
Venus is genuine irony, or a mere mask for annoyance. The Preface to the
dreary _Fils Naturel_ (it must be remembered that Alexander the Younger
himself was originally illegitimate and only later legitimated), though
rhetorical again, is not dreary at all. It contains a very agreeable
address to his father--he was always agreeable, though with a suspicion
of rather amusing patronage-upside-down, on this subject--and a good
deal else which one would have been sorry to lose. In fact, I can see,
even in the dramas, even in the prose pamphleteering, whether the matter
gives me positive delight or not, evidence of that _competence_, that
not so seldom mastery, of treatment which entitles a man to be
considered not the first comer by a long way.

[388] The obliging gentleman who on this occasion plays the part of
"substitute" in a cricket-match, is the most elaborate and confessed
example of Dumas' "theorised" _men_. He is what the seedsmen call an
"improved Valmont," with more of lion in him than to meddle with
virgins, but absolutely destructive to duchesses and always ready to
suggest substitution to distressed grass-widows.

CHAPTER XI

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

[Sidenote: The contrast of Flaubert and Dumas _fils_.]

In doing, as may at least be hoped, justice to M. Alexandre Dumas _fils_
in the last chapter, one point was excepted--that though I could rank
him higher than I ever expected to do as a novelist, I could not exactly
rank his work in the highest range of literature. When you compare
him--not merely with those greatest in novel-work already discussed, but
with Musset or Vigny, with Nodier, or with Gerard de Nerval, not to
mention others, there is something which is at once "weird and wanting,"
as the admirable Captain Mayne Reid says at the beginning of _The
Headless Horseman_, though one cannot say here, as there, "By Heavens!
it is 'the head!'" There is head enough of a kind--a not at all unkempt
or uncomely headpiece, very well filled with brains. But it has no
aureole, as the other preferred persons