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 characters and their incidents only as they illustrate an abstraction; and these also achieve their effects and earn their rewards. But Feuillet belongs in a different 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 Feuillet 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.