Page:The last days of Pompeii - Bulwer-Lytton - King.djvu/13

Rh equally consonant, perhaps, to the then existent society; for it is not only the ordinary habits of life, the feasts and the forum, the baths and the amphitheatre, the common-place routine of the classic luxury, which we recall the past to behold;—equally important, and more deeply interesting, are the passions, the crimes, the misfortunes, and reverses that might have chanced to the shades we thus summon to life! We understand any epoch of the world but ill if we do not examine its romance. There is as much truth in the poetry of life as in its prose.

As the greatest difficulty in treating of an unfamiliar and distant period is to make the characters introduced "live and move" before the eye of the reader, so such should doubtless be the first object of a work of the present description; and all attempts at the display of learning should be considered but as means subservient to this, the main requisite of fiction. The first art of the Poet (the creator) is to breathe the breath of life into his creatures—the next is to make their words and actions appropriate to the era in which they are to speak and act. This last art is, perhaps the better effected by not bringing the art itself constantly before the reader—by not crowding the page with quotations, and the margin with notes. The intuitive spirit which infuses antiquity into ancient images, is, perhaps the true learning which a work of this nature requires; without it, pedantry is offensive—with it, useless. No man who is thoroughly aware of what Prose Fiction has now become—of its dignity, of its influence, of the manner in which it has gradually absorbed all similar departments of literature, of its power in teaching as