perhaps a little later, when "the wits" handled politics and society,
literature and things in general with unquestioned competence and an
easy universality.

The rest of his work which will not appear in this edition may be
conveniently despatched here. The _Physiologie du Mariage_ and the
_Scenes de la Vie Conjugale_ suffer not merely from the most obvious
of their faults but from defect of knowledge. It may or may not be
that marriage, in the hackneyed phrase, is a net or other receptacle
where all the outsiders would be in, and all the insiders out. But it
is quite clear that Coelebs cannot talk of it with much authority. His
state may or may not be the more gracious: his judgment cannot but
lack experience. The "Theatre," which brought the author little if any
profit, great annoyance, and a vast amount of trouble, has been
generally condemned by criticism. But the _Contes Drolatiques_ are not
so to be given up. The famous and splendid _Succube_ is only the best
of them, and though all are more or less tarred with the brush which
tars so much of French literature, though the attempt to write in an
archaic style is at best a very successful _tour de force_, and
represents an expenditure of brain power by no means justifiable on
the part of a man who could have made so much better use of it, they
are never to be spoken of disrespectfully. Those who sneer at their
"Wardour Street" Old French are not usually the best qualified to do
so; and it is not to be forgotten that Balzac was a real countryman of
Rabelais and a legitimate inheritor of _Gauloiserie_. Unluckily no man
can "throw back" in this way, except now and then as a mere pastime.
And it is fair to recollect that as a matter of fact Balzac, after a
year or two, did not waste much more time on these things, and that
the intended ten _dizains_ never, as a matter of fact, went beyond
three.