In considering the work of Villiers I am brought face to face with a writer who seems to be made up of contradictions. Any theory, if it be at all precise, must proceed by making exceptions. Here is a writer who is at once a transcendentalist and a man of the world, a cynic and a believer in the things of the spirit. He is now Swift, now Bernadin de St. Pierre, now Baudelaire or Heine. In reading him you pass from exaltation to buffoonery with the turn of a page, and are never quite sure whether he is speaking seriously or in jest. Above all, everywhere there is irony; and the irony is of so fine a point, and glances in so many directions, that your judgment is distracted, interrupted, contradicted, and confused in a whirlwind of conflicting impressions. Villiers has written much. The volume of _Contes cruels_ (published in 1880) includes, I believe, work, of many periods; it contains specimens of every style its author has attempted, and in every kind the best work that he has done. The book as a whole is a masterpiece, and almost every separate tale is a masterpiece. I can think of no other collection of tales in any language on which so various and finely gifted a nature has lavished itself; none with so wide a gamut of feeling, none which is so Protean a manifestation of genius. The _Tales_ of Edgar Poe alone surpass it in sheer effect, the _Twice-Told Tales_ of Hawthorne alone approach it in variety of delicate sensation; both, compared with its shifting and iridescent play of colours, are but studies in monochrome. Around this supreme work we may group the other volumes. _La révolte,_ a drama in one act in prose, represented at the Vaudeville, May 6th, 1870, has something of the touch of certain _Contes cruels_; it is, at least, not unworthy of a place near them. _L'Ève future_ (1886), that most immense and ferocious of pleasantries, is simply one of the scientific burlesques of the _Contes_ swollen out into a huge volume, where it is likely to die of plethora. The volume of the same year, called after its first tale _L'Amour suprême,_ attempts to be a second set of _Contes Cruels;_ it has nothing of their distinction, except in _Akëdysséril. Tribulat Bonhomet,_ which appeared in 1887--"une bouffonnerie énorme et sombre, couleur du siècle," as the author has called it--is largely made up of an "Étude physiologique" published in 1867. In the two later volumes, _Histoires insolites_ (1888) and _Nouveaux contes cruels_ (1889), there are occasional glimpses of the early mastery, as in the fascinating horror of _La torture par l'espérance,_ and the delicate cynicism of _Les amies de pension._ As for the prose drama in five acts, _Le Nouveau Monde_ (1876), which had the honour of gaining a prize--"une médaille honorifique, une somme de dix mille francs même, d'autres seductions encore"--there is little in it of the true Villiers; a play with striking effects, no doubt, movement, surprises, a grandiose air;