omnibus, but M. Zola's characters are much worse. They have their
dreary vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of their
lives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what happens to
them? In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty and
imaginative power. We don't want to be harrowed and disgusted with
an account of the doings of the lower orders. M. Daudet is better.
He has wit, a light touch and an amusing style. But he has lately
committed literary suicide. Nobody can possibly care for Delobelle
with his "Il faut lutter pour l'art," or for Valmajour with his
eternal refrain about the nightingale, or for the poet in Jack with
his "mots cruels," now that we have learned from Vingt Ans de ma
Vie litteraire that these characters were taken directly from life.
To us they seem to have suddenly lost all their vitality, all the
few qualities they ever possessed. The only real people are the
people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to
life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are
creations, and not boast of them as copies. The justification of a
character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are,
but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a
work of art. As for M. Paul Bourget, the master of the roman
psychologique, he commits the error of imagining that the men and
women of modern life are capable of being infinitely analysed for
an innumerable series of chapters. In point of fact what is
interesting about people in good society--and M. Bourget rarely
moves out of the Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London,--
is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies
behind the mask. It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of
us made out of the same stuff. In Falstaff there is something of
Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff. The fat
knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young prince his