little masterpiece of the novitiate, "Hesterna Rosa"; the Damozel
herself and a Corsican lady whose portrait, unpublished and unexhibited,
has been familiar to me for six-and-thirty years;--all these and all the
others would behave to you, and you would behave to them, if they could
be vivified, in ways different individually but real and live.

[Sidenote: The reality.]

Now it is beauty of reality as well as of presentation that I at least
find in _La Morte Amoureuse_. Clarimonde alive is very much more than a
"shadow on glass"; Clarimonde dead is more alive than many live women.

[Sidenote: And the passion of it.]

But the audacity of infatuation need not stop here. I should claim for
_La Morte Amoureuse_, and for Gautier as the author of it, more than
this. It appears to me to be one of the very few expressions in French
prose of really passionate love. It is, with _Manon Lescaut_ and
_Julie_, the most consummate utterance that I at least know, in that
division of literature, of the union of sensual with transcendental
enamourment. Why this is so rare in French is a question fitter for
treatment in a _History of the French Temperament_ than in one of the
French Novel. That it is so I believe to be a simple fact, and simple
facts require little talking about. No prose literature has so much
love-making in it as French, and none so much about different species of
love: _amour de tete_ and _amour des sens_ especially, but also not
unfrequently _amour de coeur_, and even _amour d'ame_. But of the
combination that _we_ call "passionate love"--that fills our own late
sixteenth, early seventeenth, and whole nineteenth century literature,
and that requires love of the heart and the head, the soul and the
senses, together--it has (outside poetry of course)[202] only the three
books just mentioned and a few passages such as Atala's dying speech,
Adolphe's, alas! too soon obliterated reflections on his first success
with Ellenore, perhaps one or two more before _La Morte Amoureuse_, and
even since its day not many. Maupassant (_v. inf._) _could_ manage the
combination, but too often confined himself to exhibitions of the
separate and imperfect divisions, whereof, no doubt, the number is
endless.

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, a