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. close encaá o young manbood to see nor of pain fall across 1 she has arund ace when he found Steerforth wad on the beach, with arm under his head, and, later, marked the 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_manion'ation 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. མ 1:ཀ ཏཿ 1:|:ཀུག ཀླན ཀ མ བ 1:|:ཙ །ནརྞ་ྒུ curo by a mag a fine Thackeray is unlike his splendid that is have be phase bus breast wh a stride It must Gousness that wood 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 a woman whose eyes were fire, whose look was love, whose voice 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 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 produced in Amer letters, Victor Hugo as forth as the greatest is not merely his larger at lifts him above Balzac mas in this ability to vivify; a larger soul, again his keener athy. Jean Valjean will move eg us and help us by his very tcomings to be better brothers one another, when the bloodless Seraphita and her host of more carthy 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 woman who might be a friend and neighbor, as, for example, Penelope, in "The Rise of Silas Laphan." a ་་ Fiction's at might better od from the shapeless You will any gainsay the touch when he gazes, marthe figures which illusthat att sermon in allegory, \uble Faun.” Yet once the calm blood of the Fact in artist stirred warmly, and I played Pygmalion; his lovely, Work thrilled with life, such life as has made "The ScarK Letter" the sublimest piece 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. |