MAN ***




Produced by Al Haines.





[Illustration: Octave Feuillet]




                            ENGLISH EDITION
                    A Library of French Masterpieces
                         EDITED BY EDMUND GOSSE



                            THE ROMANCE OF A
                             POOR YOUNG MAN


                          TRANSLATED FROM THE
                               FRENCH OF

                            OCTAVE FEUILLET


                    WITH A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION BY
                             HENRY HARLAND


                             ILLUSTRATED BY
                             SIMONT GUILHEM



                  London: The London Book Co. MCMVII.




                       *OCTAVE FEUILLET'S NOVELS*


To be serious seriously is the way of mediocrity. To be serious gaily is
not such an easy matter. To look on at the pantomime of things, and to
see, neatly separated, tragedy here, comedy opposite--to miss the
perpetual dissolution and resolution of the one into and out of the
other--is inevitable when eyes are purblind.  _Diis aliter visum_.
Olympus laughs because it perceives so many capital reasons for pulling
a long face; and half the time pulls a long face simply to keep from
laughing.  I imagine it is in some measure the Olympian manner of seeing
which explains the gay seriousness of the work of Octave Feuillet.

Octave Feuillet possesses to an altogether remarkable degree the art of
being serious not only gaily, but charmingly.  This, to begin with,
places him and his stories in a particular atmosphere; and, if we
consider it, I think we shall recognise that atmosphere as something
very like the old familiar atmosphere of the fairy-tale.  At any rate,
there is a delicate, a fanciful symbolism in Feuillet's work, which
breathes a fragrance unmistakably reminiscent of the enchanted forest.
For an instance, one may recall the chapter in _Un Mariage dans le
Monde_ which relates the escapade of Lionel and his betrothed on the day
before their wedding. A conventional mother, busy with preparations for
the ceremony, intrusts her daughter to the chaperonage of an old aunt,
who is, we might suppose, exactly the person for the office.  But old
aunts are sometimes wonderfully made; sometimes they keep the most
unlooked-for surprises up those capacious old-fashioned sleeves of
theirs.  This one was a fairy godmother in disguise, and, I suspect, a
pupil of the grimly-benevolent Blackstick.  With good-humoured cynicism,
she remarks that the happiest period of even the happiest married life
is the day before it begins, and she advises her young charges to make
the most of it--chases them, indeed, from her presence.  "Be off with
you, my children!  Come, be off with you at once!"  They escape to the
park, where they romp like a pair of truant school-children.  That is
all; but in Feuillet's hands it becomes a fairy idyl.  It serves,
besides, the symbolic purpose of striking at the outset the note of
joyousness which he means to repeat at the end, though the book is one
that threatens, almost to the last page, to end on a note of despair.
For _Un Mariage dans le Monde_, if far from being the most successful of
Feuillet's novels, exhibits, none the less, some of his cleverest
craftsmanship.  He hoodwinks us into the fear that he meditates
disaster, only pleasantly, genially, at the right moment, to disappoint
us with the denouement we could have wished.

Feuillet's geniality, for that matter, runs through all his books, and
is one of the vital principles of his talent.  It is never the flaccid
geniality, the amiability, of the undiscerning person; it is, rather,
the wise and alert geniality of the benign magician, who is sometimes
constrained to weave black spells, because that is a part of the game,
and in the day's work, as it were, but who puts his heart only into the
weaving of spells that are rose-. This is perhaps why Feuillet's
nice people nearly always take flesh and live and breathe, his horrid
people hardly ever--another resemblance, by-the-bye, between him and the
writer of fairy-tales. The nice women, with their high-bred lovers, who
step so daintily through his pages, to the flutter of perfumed fans and
the rustle of fine silks, are as convincing as the palpitantly
convincing princesses of Hans Andersen and Grimm; but Feuillet's
villains and adventuresses, like the ogres and the witches we never very
heartily believe in, are, for the most part, the merest stereotypes of
vice and wickedness, always artificial, too often a trifle absurd.

In _Monsieur de Camors_, for example, we have an elaborate study of a
man who has determined to live by the succinct principle, "Evil, be thou
my good"--a succinct enough principle, in all conscience, though
Feuillet requires a lengthy chapter and a suicide to enunciate it.  The
idea, if not original, might, in some hands, lend itself to interesting
development; but not so in Feuillet's.  From the threshold we feel that
he is handicapped by his theme.  It hangs round his neck like the
mill-stone of the adage; it checks his artistic impulses, obscures his
artistic instincts.  The quips and cranks, the wreathed smiles, of
Feuillet the humourist, were out of place in a stupendous epopee of this
sort; so, for the sake of a psychological abstraction, which hasn't even
the poor merit of novelty, we must look on ruefully, while our merryman,
divested of cap and bells, proses to the end of his four sad hundred
pages.  There are novelists who must work with an abstraction, who can
see their