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 anaemia--a
generation devoted to the "chiselled phrase," to accumulated
"documents," to microscopic porings over human baseness, to minute
and disgustful records of what in humanity is least human--may
readily bring these unregarded and railing accusations. Like one of
the great and good-humoured Giants of Rabelais, you may hear the
murmurs from afar, and smile with disdain. To you, who can amuse
the world--to you who offer it the fresh air of the highway, the
battlefield, and the sea--the world must always return: escaping
gladly from the boudoirs and the bouges, from the surgeries and
hospitals, and dead rooms, of M. Daudet and M. Zola and of the
wearisome De Goncourt.