story of a love-chase. If he had heard
a letter from _Clarissa_, would he have been fired with the same
chivalrous ardour? I wonder. Yet _Clarissa_ has every quality that can
be shown in prose, one alone excepted--pictorial or picture-making
romance. While _Robinson_ depends, for the most part and with the
overwhelming majority of its readers, on the charm of circumstance.

In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and the
pictorial, the moral and romantic interest, rise and fall together by
a common and organic law. Situation is animated with passion, passion
clothed upon with situation. Neither exists for itself, but each
inheres indissolubly with the other. This is high art; and not only
the highest art possible in words, but the highest art of all, since
it combines the greatest mass and diversity of the elements of truth
and pleasure. Such are epics, and the few prose tales that have the
epic weight. But as from a school of works, aping the creative,
incident and romance are ruthlessly discarded, so may character and
drama be omitted or subordinated to romance. There is one book, for
example, more generally loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in
childhood, and still delights in age--I mean the _Arabian
Nights_--where you shall look in vain for moral or for intellectual
interest. No human face or voice greets us among that wooden crowd of
kings and genies, sorcerers and beggarmen. Adventure, on the most
naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment and is found enough.
Dumas approaches perhaps nearest of any modern to these Arabian
authors in the purely material charm of some of his romances. The
early part of _Monte Cristo_, down to the finding of the treasure, is
a piece of perfect story-telling; the man never breathed who shared
these moving incidents without a tremor; and yet Faria is a thing of
packthread and Dantes[20] little more than a name. The sequel is one
long-drawn error, gloomy, bloody, unnatural and dull; but as for these
early chapters, I do not believe there is another volume extant where
you can breathe the same unmingled atmosphere of romance. It is very
thin and light, to be sure, as on a high mountain; but it is brisk and
clear and sunny in proportion. I saw the other day, with envy, an old
and a very clever lady setting forth on a second or third voyage into
_Monte Cristo_. Here are stories which powerfully affect the reader,
which can be reperused at any age, and wher