still. One of the most curious literary absurdities I have ever
seen--the absurd almost drowning the disgusting in it--was an American
attempt in verse to fill up Flaubert's _lacuna_ and "go one better."

[397] The old foreign comparison with London was merely rhetorical; but
there really would seem to have been some resemblance between Carthage
and modern Berlin, even in those very points which Flaubert (taking
advice) left out.

[398] There is a recent and exceptionally good translation of the book.

[399] The Letters are almost, if not quite, of first-rate quality. The
play, _Le Candidat_, is of no merit.

[400] Vol. I. p. 4.

[401] All these will be found Englished in the Essay referred to.

[402] Too much must not be read into the word "failure": indeed the next
sentence should guard against this. I know excellent critics who,
declining altogether to consider the book as a novel, regard it as a
sort of satire and _satura_, Aristophanic, Jonsonian or other, in gist
and form, and by no means a failure as such. But as such it would have
no, or very small, place here. I think myself that it is, from that
point of view, nearer to Burton than to any one else: and I think
further that it might have been made into a success of this kind or even
of the novel sort itself. But _as it stands with the sketch of a
completion_, I do not think that Flaubert's alchemy had yet achieved or
approached projection.

[403] I have sometimes wished that Mr. Arnold had written a novel. But
perhaps _Volupte_ frightened him.

[404] There is controversy on this point, and Baudelaire's indulgence in
artificial and perilous Paradises may have been exaggerated. That it
existed to some extent is, I think, hardly doubtful.

[405] I know few things of the kind more pathetic than Theo's quiet
lament over the "artistic completeness" of his ill-luck in the collapse
of the Second Empire just when, with Sainte-Beuve dead and Merimee
dying, he was its only man of letters of the first rank left, and might
have had some relief from collar-work. But it must be remembered that
though he had ground at the mill with slaves, he had never been one of
them, and perhaps this would always have prevented his promotion.

[406] Reserving Maupassant under the "almost."

CHAPTER XII

THE OTHER "NON-NATURALS" OF THE SECOND EMPIRE

If any excuse is needed for the oddity of the title of this chapter, it
will not be to readers of Burton's _Anatomy_. Th