The deathly silence that
accompanied the ghostly onset was an added poignancy to the short-lived
dream. A moment later I beheld a hunched little figure mounted on a
white horse with housings of purple velvet. The reins lay slack in the
rider's hand; his three-cornered hat was slouched over his brows, and
his chin rested on the breast of his great-coat. Thus he slowly rode
away through the twilight, and nobody cried, _Vive l'Empereur!_
The ground on which a famous battle has been fought casts a spell upon
every man's mind; and the impression made upon two men of poetic genius,
like Victor Hugo and Edmond Rostand, might well be nearly identical.
This sufficiently explains the likeness between the fantastic silhouette
in "Les Miserables" and the battle of the ghosts in "L'Aiglon." A muse
so rich in the improbable as M. Rostand's need not borrow a piece of
supernaturalness from anybody.
PLOT AND CHARACTER
HENRY JAMES, in his paper on Anthony Trollope, says that if Trollope
"had taken sides on the rather superficial opposition between novels
of character and novels of plot, I can imagine him to have said (except
that he never expressed himself in epigram) that he preferred the former
class, inasmuch as character in itself is plot, while plot is by no
means character.
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