That Gautier always or often maintained himself at this pitch, either of what we may call power of projecting live personages or of exhibition of great passions, it would be idle and uncritical to contend; that he did so here, and thereby put himself at once and for ever on the higher, nay, highest level of literature, I do, after fifty years' study of the thing and of endless other things, impenitently and impavidly affirm. [Sidenote: Other short stories.] What is more, in his shorter productions he was often not far below it, save in respect of intensity. If I do not admire _Fortunio_ quite so much as some people do, it is not so much because of its comparative heartlessness--a thing rare in Gautier--as because for once, and I think once only in pieces of its scale, the malt of the description _does_ get above the meal of the personal interest, though that personal interest exists. But _Jettatura_, with its combination of romantic and tragical appeal; _Avatar_, with its extraordinary mixture of romance, again, with humour, its "excitingness," and its delicacy of taste; the equally extraordinary felicity of the dealings with that too often unmanageable implement the "classical dictionary" in _Arria Marcella_, _Une Nuit de Cleopatre_, and perhaps especially _Le Roi Candaule_; the tiny sketches--half-_nouvelle_ and half-"middle" article--of _Le Pied de la Momie_, _La Pipe d'Opium_, and _Le Club des Haschischins_,--what marvellous consummateness in the various specifications and conditions do these afford us! Sometimes, however, I have thought that just as _La Morte Amoureuse_ is almost or quite sufficient text for vindicating the greatness or greaterness of "Theo," so his earliest book of prose fiction, _Les Jeune-France_, will serve the same purpose for another side of him, lesser if anybody likes, but exceptionally "complementary." In particular it possesses a quality which up to his time was very rare in France, has not been extraordinarily common there even since, and is still, even in its ancestral home with ourselves, sometimes inconceivably blundered about--the quality of Humour.[203] [Sidenote: Gautier's humour--_Les Jeune-France_.]