XIV * INTRODUCTION

featured to a loathsome degree. He was better inspired, more typically realistic, when, following the example of Dumas in La question d'argent and of Augier in Les effrontés, he soraetimes chose money as the mainspring of his action." Like ail true realista, Paul Hervieu scrupulously tried to keep himself out of his works, to be rigidly impcrsonal. He gives us facts, set in clear, cold light ; we find in his works no atmosphère of dreaminess or revery, 1 * no suggestiveness other than the logical déduction from the situation described.

Hervieu as a Novelist. — It was no impelling vocation, but a deliberate choice, an act of the will, that made Paul Hervieu turn from the professions of the law and diplomacy to that of writing. Influenced perhaps by the success and the vogue of contemporary writers of fiction, it was that field whîch he first essayed. In most of his novels, including the best-known, Peints par eux-mêmes and L'armature, he describes " society," with whîch he was familiar. The picture is far from attractive. The artificiality, emptbiess, and sensuality of this life are rendered in a spirit of cold raillery and pitiless irony. Like a better fiction-writer, Mérimée, whom he resembled in more than one way, Hervieu lacked the breadth, the facility, and the conviction that stamp the really great novelist." The best part of his art, in fiction, is his ability to stage events, to présent them dramatically." Peints par eux-mêmes, written in the shape of letters — a ktnd of dialogue — already approximatif the dramatic form.

Hervieu' as a Playwright: a. General Characteristics. — Hervieu's first play, Point de lendemain, is unimportant, a pretty adaptation of an eighteenth-century story. Les paroles restent, more dramatic and more serious, is buîlt around the idea that words can kilL In succeeding plays, beginning with

» The most striking instance is in his novel, L'armature, which, in collaboration with Brieux, he afterwards dramatiied. #•; « Cf. Estève, toc ri(., p. 14.

» Ib. p. 41.