faithfulness of
a true workman to a vocation so emphatic, was mainly of the esoteric
order. But poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it
may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common
things, after Gray's way (though Gray too, it is well to remember,
seemed in his own day, seemed even to Johnson, obscure) or it may
actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in
themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from
their very birth. Rossetti did something, something excellent, of the
former kind; but his characteristic, his really revealing work, lay in
the adding to poetry of fresh poetic material, of a new order of
phenomena, in the creation of a new ideal.

1883.

FEUILLET'S "LA MORTE"

[219] IN his latest novel M. Octave Feuillet adds two charming people
to that chosen group of personages in which he loves to trace the
development of the more serious elements of character amid the
refinements and artifices of modern society, and which make such good
company. The proper function of fictitious literature in affording us
a refuge into a world slightly better--better conceived, or better
finished--than the real one, is effected in most instances less through
the imaginary events at which a novelist causes us to assist, than by
the imaginary persons to whom he introduces us. The situations of M.
Feuillet's novels are indeed of a real and intrinsic
importance:--tragic crises, inherent in the general conditions of human
nature itself, or which arise necessarily out of the special conditions
of modern society. Still, with him, in the actual result, they become
subordinate, as it is their tendency to do in real life, to the
characters they help to form. Often, his most attentive reader will
have forgotten the actual details of his plot; while [220] the soul,
tried, enlarged, shaped by it, remains as a well-fixed type in the
memory. He may return a second or third time to Sibylle, or Le Journal
d'une Femme, or Les Amours de Philippe, and watch, surprised afresh,
the clean, dainty, word-sparing literary operation (word-sparing, yet
with no loss of real grace or ease) which, sometimes in a few pages,
with the perfect logic of a problem of Euclid, complicates and then
unravels some moral embarrassment, really worthy of a trained dramatic
expert. But the characters themselves, the agents in those difficult,
revealing situations, such a reader wil