" But there are journals and journals, as
the French say, and what goes into them depends on the eye that gathers
for them. It is a long step from St. Simon to Dangeau, from Pepys to
Thoresby, from Shakespeare even to the Marquis de Chateaubriand. M. Hugo
alone, convinced that, as founder of the French Romantic School, there is
a kind of family likeness between himself and Shakespeare, stands boldly
forth to prove the father as extravagant as the son. Calm yourself, M.
Hugo, you are no more a child of his than Will Davenant was! But, after
all, is it such a great crime to produce something absolutely new in a
world so tedious as ours, and so apt to tell its old stories over again?
I do not mean new in substance, but in the manner of presentation. Surely
the highest office of a great poet is to show us how much variety,
freshness, and opportunity abides in the obvious and familiar. He invents
nothing, but seems rather to _re_-discover the world about him, and his
penetrating vision gives to things of daily encounter something of the
strangeness of new creation. Meanwhile the changed conditions of modern
life demand a change in the method of treatment. The ideal is not a
strait-waistcoat. Because _Alexis and Dora_ is so charming, shall we have
no _Paul and Virginia?_ It was the idle endeavor to reproduce the old
enchantment in the old way that gave us the pastoral, sent to the garret
now with our grandmothers' achievements of the same sort in worsted.
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