ABSTRACT
The ultimate purpose of the novelesque and dramatic arts consists in evolving the possible in man as a moral and dynamical intelligence, viewed under certain modifying conditions, arising from his relations to society. But the novelist is the artist of society. People who are described as artificial, eccentric, and affected, are common both in real life and novels, but the very words which we apply to them will be found to contain an idea exactly opposite to that of naturalness. It is difficult, on reading the Romance of a Poor Young Man, to determine whether Octave Feuillet is more of novelist than poet. It is less a novel than a scientific treatise; it is less a representation of social life than the demonstration of a philosophical theorem, and we finish reading it with a sentiment very near akin to that of Hamlet, when he made that oft repeated observation to Horatio.
