A generation suffering from mental and physical anæmia—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.
With all your frankness, and with that queer morality of the Camp which, if it swallows a camel now and again, never strains at a gnat, how healthy and wholesome, and even pure, are your romances! You never gloat over sin, nor dabble with an ugly curiosity in the corruptions of sense. The passions in your tales are honourable and brave, the motives are clearly human. Honour, Love, Friendship make the threefold cord, the clue your knights and dames follow through how delightful a labyrinth of adventures! Your greatest books, I take the liberty to maintain, are the Cycle of the Valois (“La Reine Margot,” “La Dame de Montsoreau,” “Les Quarante-cinq”), and the Cycle of Louis Treize and Louis Quatorze (“Les Trois Mousquetaires,” “Vingt Ans Après,” “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne”); and, beside these two trilogies—a lonely monument, like the sphinx hard by the three pyramids—“Monte Cristo.”
In these romances how easy it would have been for you to burn incense to that great goddess, Lubricity, whom our critic says your people worship. You had Brantôme, you had Tallemant, you had Rétif, and a dozen others, to furnish materials for scenes of voluptuousness and of blood that would have outdone even the present _naturalistes_. From these alcoves of “Les Dames Galantes,” and from the torture chambers (M. Zola would not have spared us one starting sinew of brave La Mole on the rack) you turned, as Scott would have turned, without a thought of their profitable literary uses. You had other metal to work on: you gave us that superstitious and tragical true love of La Mole’s, that devotion—how tender and how pure!—of Bussy for the Dame de Montsoreau. You gave us the valour of D’Artagnan, the strength of Porthos, the melancholy nobility of Athos: Honour, Chivalry, and Friendship. I declare your characters are real people to me and old friends. I cannot bear to read the end of “Bragelonne,” and to part with them for ever. “Suppose Porthos, Athos, and Aramis should enter with a noiseless swagger, curling their moustaches.” How we would welcome them, forgiving D’Artagnan even his hateful _fourberie_ in the case of Milady. The brilliance of your dialogue has never been approached: there is wit everywhere; repartees glitter and ring like the flash and clink of small-swords. Then what duels are yours! and what inimitable battle-pieces! I know four good fights of one against a multitude, in literature. These are the Death of Gretir the Strong, the Death of Gunnar of Lithend, the Death of Hereward the Wake, the Death of Bussy d’Amboise. We can compare the strokes of the heroic fighting-times with those described in later days; and, upon my word, I do not know that the short sword of Gretir, or the bill of Skarphedin, or the bow of Gunnar was better wielded than the rapier of your Bussy or the sword and shield of Kingsley’s Hereward.