ng, for the student of the novel in Pigault-Lebrun.[424] In
the first place, one is constantly reminded of that redeeming point
which the benevolent Joe Gargery found in Mr. Pumblechook--

And, wotsume'er the failings on his part,
He were a corn-and-seedsman in his hart.

If Pigault cannot exactly be said to have been a good novelist, he
"were" a novelist "in his hart." Beside his _polissonneries_, his
frequent dulness, his singular gropings and failures at anything like
good novelist _faire_, one constantly finds what might be pedantically
and barbarously called a "novelistic velleity." His much too ambitiously
titled _Melanges Litteraires_ turn to stories, though stories touched
with the _polisson_ brush. His _Nouvelles_ testify at least to his
ambition and his industry in the craft of fiction. "Je ne suis pas
Voltaire," he says somewhere, in reference, I think, to his plays, not
his tales. He most certainly is not; neither is he Marmontel, as far as
the tale is concerned. But as for the longer novel, in a blind and
blundering way, constantly trapped and hindered by his want of genius
and his want of taste, by his literary ill-breeding and other faults, he
seems to have more of a "glimmering" of the real business than they
have, or than any other Frenchman had before him.

[Sidenote: His general characteristics.]

Pigault-Lebrun[425] spent nearly half of his long life in the nineteenth
century, and did not die till Scott was dead in England, and the great
series of novel-romances had begun, with Hugo and others, in France. But
he was a man of nearly fifty in 1800, and the character of his work,
except in one all-important point, or group of points, is thoroughly of
the eighteenth, while even the excepted characteristics are of a more
really transitional kind than anything in Chateaubriand and Madame de
Stael, whom we have postponed, as well as in Constant and Xavier de
Maistre, whom we have admitted. He has no high reputation in literature,
and, except from our own special point of view, he does not deserve even
a demi-reputation. Although he is not deliberately pornographic, he is
exceedingly coarse, with a great deal of the nastiness which is not even
naughty, but nastiness pure and simple. There is, in fact, and in more
ways than one, something in him of an extremely inferior Smollett.
Comparing him with his elder contemporary, Restif de la Bretonne, he is
vulgar, which Restif never is. Passing to more p