when he is omnipotent in that sphere, nor have we overmuch patience with the prophecy that any end shall be set to such a time. But did the Wizard create? Never! He wove the finest stories known, loving the web of them incomparably better than any figures required to stage them. He threw his soul into the making of his tales, instead. of making his men and women and leaving them to live the stories after life's immutable fiats. The same has been true of the romantic school from its earliest stroke until to-day, from the portrayal in unfading tints of demigods and noble-statured men in the Ilian age, down to the late art birth in the Zenda tales, of the White Company and Red Robe kind. One and all, the romanticists pursue their stories' thread with so intense an absorption and love, that they forget to consider whether their actors are breathing creatures or mere dummies. Had Shakespeare himself followed only his romances, failing to feel with Othello or Cordelia as individual man and maid, the one could not have been all vibrant pulse and flaming breath, nor the other an incarnate devotion quivering with a girl's heart-beats. There were fibres in Fielding's nature that stirred in sympathy with each separate rascality of Tom Jones, thus making a very genuine scamp of the eighteenth century hero. But Richardson remained the impassive moralist from opening page to final. So, while his preaching is often warm enough and human enough to enlist our willing hearing, yet poor Clarissa, pretty, weeping Pamela, and correct Sir Charles are never more than rather stiff and underdrawn illustrations in the author's quaint homiletics. Defoe was a child in tale-telling. Yet a child's tale may be more eloquent, and surely more ardent, more saturate with feeling, than his world-weary elder's. Thus it came that, while Defoe had but sparse elements in his tale, yet they were bona fide; his island was genuine soil and rocks, surrounded by water one could swim in, his solitary was a man who ate, and drank milk, and missed human companionship, and, walking, made indubitable tracks, finding other footprints equally as indubitable. The earliest English novelist was beyond a doubt entirely en rapport with his hero and Friday; for which reason, Crusoe and his faithful man came alive, and will live forever. We pass to Bulwer, recognizing his stories as those that English letters could not spare without losing a class and kind. Yet this master of felicitous diction and dramatic action barely remembered on wide apart occasions to breathe into the nostrils of his factitious creatures. Or was he not able? He is not described to us as a man of ready affections. One he loved; and Pelham's young impetuosity is, therefore, very human. Another he was drawn to by some power beyond himself; and so Eugene Aram's remorse has become an unforgettable thing, as that of some near acquaintance whom we have known hounded by ghosts of his past sins. Now and again, looking in on other scenes set by Bulwer, one is impelled to declare that a heart-throb proceeds from no mechanism, but bounding blood created it. Dickens was the master artist. Ah, how he drew!-sometimes as the world's greatest cartoonist, sometimes in the immortal line of beauty; again, tracing out the perfect curve of love, and once more with the deep and fatal stroke of tragedy. He loved his pictures as such, and generations beyond count will go on repeating that love in ardent degree. Yet it was rare that he took down one of his masterpieces from the wall, laid his breath upon the lips, and commanded, "Live as I live!" No doubt about Copperfield, dear to Dickens as his own life. You and I are as sure of David to-day as of some old school friend. Have we not marvelled as the blood came and went in his boyish cheeks, been close enough to him in his young manhood to see the gray pallor of pain fall across his face when he found Steerforth dead on the beach, with arm under his head, and, later, marked the very tremor of his voice when older, more worn, but a better man, he speaks to Agnes of love? What is it that makes Copperfield a friend who walks and talks confidingly with us, while Nicholas Nickleby remains simply a faultless portraiture? What but the keen and perpetual sympathy of Dickens with the former? So entirely did David's creator feel with him, that one hears in unceasing iteration how in this book Dickens gave the world his own life. Scarcely so; yet it may be truly said that in this hero he lives again. Thackeray is unlike his splendid brother. In Dickens, art and life stand distinct and apart, rendering discrimination easy. But with the maker of Becky Sharp it is different; so fine is his art, and so artistic the life he creates, that much confusion and some unseemly disputation have arisen as to the share of his work that each may claim. Laura and Amelia, little Mrs. Pendennis, Lady Castlewood, Jos. Sedley, poor, pretty, ingenuous Fanny, dear adorable old. Dobbin, the incomparable Mrs. Major O'Dowd, Esmond himself, magnificent but shadowy,—are they all merely paint and canvas? we ask, holding breath to catch the answer. But ah! sometimes the master moves among them in affection, and the watcher sees these men and women step down from their glittering frames and move with the true gait of pulsing life. Those are genuine sobs, springing from almost too real a heartache in Amelia's breast, when the handsome and vain sprig she has chosen before true-souled Dobbin goes dancing devotion around Mrs. Rawdon Crawley. One notes, too, the ashen wanness that creeps to the very lips of Esmond when he stands before us, every inch a man, while he and the young viscount break their swords in the face of the prince whose perfidy has cost their allegiance and perhaps a crown. Here, indeed, is life. But the next time we would have it so again, and we are intolerant of that doubt which whispers of a cunning manipulation of wires and chiaroscuro by a magician, laughing when he mocks us with puppets. It is good to feel sure of some of Thackeray's figures. Pendennis, for example, is sometimes a cad, sometimes a trifler, and not infrequently a fine fellow. But, be the phase what it may, life throbs in his breast always, and he moves with a stride that is undeniably British. It must have been in unconsciousness that the author vitalized him so in tensely; we seriously doubt if a man of Thackeray's temperament could have realized in full how he loved this fellow Pen above the others of his making. "Man and brother" he called Pen, and made him such indeed. Blanche Amory and fair Lady Beatrix of Castlewood, too, are more than simply pictures of spoiled beauties; we have drawn near them, laughed at their caprices, murmured love-words into their pretty ears. A thousand youths have sighed sentimentally when Blanche sang, “O, Mes Larmes!" then sighed regretfully on catching her hiding Foker's ring from Arthur, and all feel for her a good-natured contempt that still does not kill a certain sort of admiration. Another thousand dream that they have danced with Beatrix, longing to go down on their knees and kiss the buckles on her high-heeled little slippers, or the silver clocks on her scarlet stockings, as her cousin Harry did. What a radiant, breathing maidenhood she is when she steps statelily down the stairs at Walcote to meet Esmond, holding the candle high to show well the heart-roses in her cheeks and the youth-light dancing in her eyes! Doubtless you recall that "she was a brown beauty; that is, her eyes, hair, and eye-brows and eye-lashes were dark; her hair curling with rich undulations and waving over her shoulders; but her complexion was as dazzling white as snow in sunshine except her cheeks, which were bright red, and her lips, which were of a still deeper crimson. Her mouth and chin, they said, were too large and full; and so they might be for a goddess in marble, but not for Woman whose eyes were fire, whose look was love, whose voice a was the sweetest low song, whose shape was perfect symmetry, health, decision, activity, whose foot, as it planted itself on the ground, was firm but flexible, and whose motion, whether rapid or slow, was always perfect grace. Agile as a nymph, lofty as a queen, now melting, now imperious, now sarcastic, there was no single movement of hers but was beautiful." Radiance and light gloriously incarnate, there she stands, and all who look are lovers with Esmond. But no one forgets another tense moment when we are drawn close enough to feel her breath come pantingly as she utters the low, tragic words, half hissing them between set set teeth: "Farewell, Mother; I think I never can forgive you; something hath broke between us that no tears or years can repair." Yet it was not even in beautiful Beatrix that Thackeray reached the acme of his creative power; for, after Pendennis, it was Becky Sharp whom he cared most for and has endowed with most enduring life. The maker of this marvellous woman would no doubt be more amazed than amused if he could step for a moment into the babble of our new era and listen to callow youths who assail the author's injustice to the gifted woman, and his motive in scattering such insinuations regarding her character; could hear them declare Becky "a far better woman than Mr. Thackeray would have you believe, in fact not a bad woman in any way, only one who had to shift for herself from beginning to end, and who schemed simply because she could not get things she needed without scheming." To the dogmatic critics who tire somely repeat that all is art in Thackeray, and nothing life, this must be a difficult argument to contravert, this chivalrous defence of a very real Becky which continually emanates from young enthusiasm and softness of heart. Call her a portrait when she is as genuine a siren as ever charmed youth by enchantments of lifted or veiled eyes, tearful lashes, heaving breast, soft syllables over softer lips, accents of sympathy, and acts of subtlest calculation? No; it is life we are gazing on, and are drawn to or repelled by. Young enthusiasm. is more than half right, with its fierce, unintended tribute to the power of him who created this wonderful woman and set her where she may still ensnare judgment and lead it whither whither she chooses. Among the Titans of Fiction's Olympus, Nathaniel Hawthorne will forever be accorded a place. But But ask your most discriminating critic whether he thinks of Hawthorne as a painter, or as a creator. He will answer no to the one, and yet probably no to the other. For the great New Englander constitutes a class of his own. His art might better be called sculpturesque than pictorial, for in its finer essence it is one with that of the master who chisels beauty and good from the shapeless stone. Nor will any gainsay the Phidian touch when he gazes, marvelling, on the figures which illustrate that art sermon in allegory, "The Marble Faun." Yet once the calm blood of the Puritan artist stirred warmly, and he played Pygmalion; his lovely, frozen work thrilled with life, such life as has made "The Scarlet Letter" the sublimest piece of fiction ever produced in America. In Gallic letters, Victor Hugo surely stands forth as the greatest maker. It is not merely his larger genius that lifts him above Balzac and Dumas in this ability to vivify; it is his larger soul, again his keener sympathy. Jean Valjean will move among us and help us by his very shortcomings to be better brothers. to one another, when the bloodless Seraphita and her host of more earthy brothers and sisters, yea, and even the gay and engaging d'Artagnan are forgotten. Daudet has the life-endowing force: Tartarin is a human fact, as is his British fellow, Mr. Pickwick. Extravagant undeniably are both, to the very borders of caricature; but so are many fat, middle-aged Cockneys and Gauls, who entertain their club comrades and boarding house mates to-day. Pickwick and the Tarasconian are but two among many. In our later literature, there are occasionally creations: it is not wholly photography or portrait painting, with fine writing. Mr. William Dean Howells' "realistic" men and women seldom seem to me real, although his New England kitchens, his sleighrides, magazine sanctums, air-tight heaters, village lawyers' shabby offices, all his stage setting, indeed, may be genuine enough. Yet here and there through his narratives walks a woman who might be a friend and neighbor, as, for example, Penelope, in "The Rise of Silas Lapham." Richard Harding Davis would not be called in the main a sympathetic man, yet he has moulded with the true maker's touch of feeling once at least; for Van Bibber is a creation. More than one New Yorker has at times overheard some visitor to the metropolis say to another, "Ah, look! that must be Van Bibber!" For few can think but they will meet this debonair boulevardier some fine day. Glance at Hardy. His Tess is flesh and blood, quite too much so to justify her maker's appellation of her. Indeed, her exceeding actuality it was that caused some to pray, on her first arrival, that in future Mr. Hardy would give us just canvases! Hall Caine has often created. Look merely at "The Bondman." Red Jason moves with volition and joys in the heart-beats of a strong, free and daring man. Sunlocks is a beautiful, mild-eyed viking in his first appearance; yet this is only a handsome dummy that Hall Caine mistakenly and momentarily asks us to accept for the living hero, who is not long in stepping on the stage in propria persona. And, despite the floating yellow locks, limpid, sea-blue eyes, and all the rest of the gorgeous make-up which seems to stamp him as of the mystical, mythical Norse age, one is not slow to perceive that this hero's pulses leap from no machinery, but from the propulsion of bounding human blood. In a category like this, the reader expects the name of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, who, but for the lack of such essential qualities as that rare insight into and vital sympathy with character, might rank close to her greatest countrywoman. True, Mrs. Ward developed a fair degree of creative power between "Robert Elsmere," a very fine, thoughtful, but perfectly lifeless work, and "Marcella," less finished but far more vivid and human. Notice how the author clings to the latter, with a feeling bordering on George Eliot's creature-loves: and through this very clinging it undoubtedly is that Marcella has caught something of a woman's warmth and soul, something that differentiates her, at least when she reappears in Sir George Tressady's sorry life-story, from the pulseless Catherine, Rose, Eleanor, and other feminine pictures in Mrs. Ward's stately gallery. Were this review dated a few years back, the writer would scarcely dare omit to mention Trilby, whose apotheosis was indeed one of the literary marvels of the last decade. But to-day everybody is awake to the fact that there never was any Trilby except the one Mr. Du Maurier put on canvas, with the gown of Sappho and the face of a white angel. Many one-time believers are now almost ready to deny that they once gazed on and loved this beautiful portrait until they knew by heart every faultless line and tint, then shut their eyes and listened to the painter's eloquent voice while he persuaded them that this Trilbyangel breathed humanly, like ourselves, and walked. On common earth, and sinned uncommon sins, but kept her seraph voice and all the while exhaled seraph purity. Why not say you were cheated, but that your cheating was made easier to the author because he brought to his aid Taffy and the Laird, who, if they are not veritable human beings, are at least the cleverest mechanisms that ever deceived. But, Mr. Du Maurier, even when your art is so utterly convincing, what harm in going back to honesty and calling it-just art? At the present hour, the schools |