nd applaud when the heroic
mother slashes her daughter's surreptitious portrait in full Academy.
The object of melodrama is to make men rejoice and laugh; but it seems
to me to require the stage to do it on, or at any rate to receive an
immense assistance from theatrical presentation. So given, it escapes
the curse of _segnius irritant_, because it attacks both ear and eye;
being entirely independent of style (which _is_ in such cases actually
_genant_), it does not need the quiet and solitary devotion which
enjoyment of style demands; and it is immensely improved by dresses and
_decor_, scenery and music, and "spectacle" generally--all things which,
again, interfere with pure literary enjoyment. I shall hope to have
demonstrated, or at any rate done something to show, how Dumas, when at
his best, and even not quite at his best, escapes the actual
melodramatic. Perhaps this was because he had purged himself of the
stagy element in his abundant theatric exercise earlier. Sue, of course,
dramatised or got dramatised a considerable part of his many inventions;
but I think one can see that they were not originally stage-stuff.

If, however, any one must have melodrama, but at the same time does not
want it in stage form, I should myself recommend to him Frederic Soulie
in preference to Eugene Sue. Soulie is, indeed, a sort of blend of Dumas
and Sue, but more melodramatic than the former, and less full of grime
and purpose and other "non-naturals" of the novel than the latter. It is
evident that he has taken what we may call his schedules pretty directly
from Scott himself; but he has filled them up with more melodramatic
material. It is very noteworthy, too, that Soulie, like Dumas, turned
_his_ stagy tastes and powers on to actual stage-work, and so kept the
two currents duly separate. And it seems to be admitted that he had
actual literary power, if he did not achieve much actual literary
performance.

[Sidenote: _Le Chateau des Pyrenees._]

For myself, I think that _Le Chateau des Pyrenees_ is a thing, that in
De Quincey's famous phrase, you _can_ recommend to a friend whose
appetite in fiction is melodramatic. Here is, if not exactly "_God's_
plenty," at any rate plenty of a kind--plenty whose horn is
inexhaustible and the reverse of monotonous. You never, though you have
read novels as the waves of the sea or the sands of the shore in number,
know exactly what is going to happen, and when you think you know what
is