e way in which the
phrase "Those six non-natural things" occurs and recurs there; the
inextinguishable tendency--in view of the eccentricity of its
application--to forget that the six include things as "natural" (in a
non-technical[407] sense) as Diet, to forget also what it really means
and expect something uncanny--these are matters familiar to all
Burtonians. And they may excuse the borrowing of that phrase as a
general label for those novelists, other than Flaubert and Dumas _fils_,
who, if their work was not limited to 1850-70, began in (but not "with")
that period, and worked chiefly in it, while they were at once _not_
"Naturalists" and yet more or less as "natural" as any of Burton's six.
One of the two least "minor," Alphonse Daudet, was among Naturalists but
scarcely of them. The other, Octave Feuillet, was anti-Naturalist to the
core.

[Sidenote: Feuillet.]

This latter, the elder of the two, though not so much the elder as used
to be thought,[408] was at one time one of the most popular of French
novelists both at home and abroad; but, latterly in particular, there
were in his own country divers "dead sets" at him. He had been an
Imperialist, and this excited one kind of prejudice against him; he
was, in his way, orthodox in religion, and this aroused another; while,
as has been already said, though his subjects, and even his treatment of
them, would have sent our English Mrs. Grundy of earlier days into
"screeching asterisks," the peculiar grime of Naturalism nowhere
smirches his pages. For my own part I have always held him high, though
there is a smatch about his morality which I would rather not have
there. He seems to me to be--with the no doubt numerous transformations
necessary--something of a French Anthony Trollope, though he has a
tragic power which Trollope never showed; and, on the other side of the
account, considerably less comic variety.

[Sidenote: His novels generally.]

As a "thirdsman" to Flaubert and Dumas _fils_, he shows some interesting
differences. Merely as a maker of literature, he cannot touch the
former, and has absolutely nothing of his poetic imagination, while his
grasp of character is somewhat thinner and less firm. But it is more
varied in itself and in the plots and scenery which give it play and
setting--a difference not necessary but fortunate, considering his very
much larger "output." Contrasted with Dumas _fils_, he affords a more
important difference still, indeed