Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Romance of a Poor Young Man
In Monsieur d'e 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, ob scures 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 abstrac tion, 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 characters and theirincidents only as they illustrate an abstraction and these also achieve their effects and earn their rewards. But F euillet belongs in adifferent galley. A handful of human nature, a pleasing countryside, and Paris in the distance these are his materials. The philosophy and the plot may come as they will, and it really doesn't much matter if they never come at all. To give Feuil let a subject is to attach a chain and ball to his pen. He is never so debonair, so sympathetic, so satisfying a writer, as when he has something just short of nothing to write about. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
