awthorne such romance-writing seemed the natural growth of an
exquisitely sensitive and spiritual nature, while among later French
writers Theophile Gautier and Edmond About have entered into the domain
of the impossible as into the natural heritage of their genius, sporting
in its impalpable ether with the tuneful _abandon_ of a fish in the sea,
or a bird in the air, hampered by no bond of the actual, weighted by no
encumbrance of the material.

It is not strange that the great influx of realistic novels that has
flowed in upon the last decade should be followed by a revulsion to the
impossible in fiction. Men and women, wearied with meeting the same
characters and events in so-called romance that they encounter in
every-day life, or saddened by the depressing, if dramatic, pictures of
Tolstoi and the cool vivisection of humanity presented by Ibsen, turn
with a sense of rest and refreshment to the guidance of those who, like
Robert Louis Stevenson and Rider Haggard, lead them suddenly into the
mystic land of wonder, or, like Marion Crawford and Mrs. Oliphant,
delight to draw them, by gentle and easy stages, from the midst of a
well-appointed setting of every-day life into the shadowy borderland
that lies between the real and the unreal. Much of the success of such
romance writing rests upon the rebound, natural to humanity, from
intense realism to extreme ideality; more, perhaps, upon the fact that
this age which is grossly material is also deeply spiritual. With these
two facts well in view, Mr. Oscar Wilde has fallen into line, and
entered the lists with some of the most successful masters of fiction.
In his novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray," written for the July
_Lippincott's_, Mr. Wilde, like Balzac and the authors of "Faust" and
"John Inglesant," presents to us the drama of a human soul, while, like
Gautier and About, he surrounds his utterly impossible story with a
richness and depth of colouring and a grace and airiness of expression
that make the perusal of its pages an artistic delight.

If Mr. Wilde's romance resembles the productions of some of the writers
of the French school in its reality and tone, it still more strongly
resembles Mr. Stevenson's most powerfully wrought fairy tale, "Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," although the moral of the story is brought out
even more plainly--as plainly, indeed, as in the drama of "Faust." In
both Mr. Stevenson's and Mr. Wilde's stories there is a transformation
or substit