as's
men--so gallant, so frank, so indomitable, such swordsmen, and such
trenchermen. Like M. de Rochefort in 'Vingt Ans Apres,' like that
prisoner of the Bastille, your genius 'n'est que d'un parti, c'est du
parti du grand air.'

There seems to radiate from you a still persistent energy and enjoyment;
in that current of strength not only your characters live, frolic,
kindly, and sane, but even your very collaborators were animated by the
virtue which went out of you. How else can we explain it, the dreary
charge which feeble and envious tongues have brought against you, in
England and at home? They say you employed in your novels and dramas
that vicarious aid which, in the slang of the studio, the 'sculptor's
ghost' is fabled to afford.

Well, let it be so; these ghosts, when uninspired by you, were faint
and impotent as 'the strengthless tribes of the dead' in Homer's Hades,
before Odysseus had poured forth the blood that gave them a momentary
valour. It was from you and your inexhaustible vitality that these
collaborating spectres drew what life they possessed; and when they
parted from you they shuddered back into their nothingness. Where are
the plays, where the romances which Maquet and the rest wrote in their
own strength? They are forgotten with last year's snows; they have
passed into the wide waste-paper basket of the world. You say of
D'Artagnan, when severed from his three friends--from Porthos, Athos,
and Aramis--'he felt that he could do nothing, save on the condition
that each of these companions yielded to him, if one may so speak, a
share of that electric fluid which was his gift from heaven.'

No man of letters ever had so great a measure of that gift as you; none
gave of it more freely to all who came--to the chance associate of the
hour, as to the characters, all so burly and full-blooded, who flocked
from your brain. Thus it was that you failed when you approached the
supernatural. Your ghosts had too much flesh and blood, more than the
living persons of feebler fancies. A writer so fertile, so rapid,
so masterly in the ease with which he worked, could not escape the
reproaches of barren envy. Because you overflowed with wit, you could
not be 'serious;' Because you created with a word, you were said to
scamp your work; because you were never dull, never pedantic, incapable
of greed, you were to be censured as desultory, inaccurate, and
prodigal.

A generation suffering from mental and physical