iciality and his
consummate cleverness.]

The great excuse for him, from the non-literary point of view, is that
this world of his--narrow though crowded as it is, corrupt,
preposterous, inviting the Judgment that came after it as no period
perhaps has ever done, except that immediately before the Deluge, that
of the earlier Roman empire, and one other--was a real world in its day,
and left, as all real things do, an abiding mark and influence on what
followed. One of the scores and almost hundreds of sayings which
distinguish him, trivial as he seems to some and no doubt disgusting as
he seems to others, is made by one of his most characteristic and most
impudent but not most offensive heroes _a la_ Richelieu, who says, not
in soliloquy nor to a brother _roue_, but to the mistress of the moment:
"If love-making is not always a pleasure, at any rate it is always a
kind of occupation." That is the keynote of the Crebillon novel: it is
the handbook, with illustrative examples, of the business, employment,
or vocation of flirting, in the most extensive and intensive meanings of
that term comprehensible to the eighteenth century.

[Sidenote: The Crebillonesque atmosphere and method.]

Now you should never scamp or hurry over business: and Crebillon
observes this doctrine in the most praiseworthy fashion. With the
thorough practicality of his century and of his nation (which has always
been in reality the most practical of all nations) he sets to work to
give us the ways and manners of his world. It is an odd world at first
sight, but one gets used to its conventions. It is a world of what they
used to call, in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century,
"high fellers" and of great ladies, all of whom--saving for glimpses of
military and other appointments for the men, which sometimes take them
away and are useful for change of scene, of theatres, balls,
gaming-tables for men and women both--"have nothing in the world to do"
but carry on that occupation which Clitandre of "The Night and the
Moment," at an extremely suitable time and in equally appropriate
circumstances, refers to in the words quoted above. There are some other
oddities about this world. In some parts of it nobody seems to be
married. Mrs. Grundy, and even persons more exercised in actual fact
than Mrs. Grundy, would expect them all to be, and to neglect the tie.
But sometimes Crebillon finds it easier to mask this fact. Often his
ladies are actual