was tempted, and temptations are beautiful at least in
part; and a work which dwells on the ugliness of crime
and gives no hint of any loveliness in the temptation,
sins against the modesty of life, and even when a Tolstoi
writes it, sinks to melodrama. The peasants are not
understood; they saw their life in fairer colours; even
the deaf girl was clothed in poetry for Mikita, or he had
never fallen. And so, once again, even an Old Bailey
melodrama, without some brightness of poetry and lustre
of existence, falls into the inconceivable and ranks with
fairy tales.

In nobler books we are moved with something like
the emotions of life; and this emotion is very variously
provoked. We are so moved when Levine labours in
the field, when Andr sinks beyond emotion, when
Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the
river, when Antony, "not cowardly, puts off his helmet,"
when Kent has infinite pity on the dying Lear, when, in
Dostoieffky Despised and Rejected, the uncomplaining
hero drains his cup of suffering and virtue. These are
notes that please the great heart of man. Not only love,
and the fields, and the bright face of danger, but sacrifice
and death and unmerited suffering humbly supported,
touch in us the vein of the poetic. We love to think of
them, we long to try them, we are humbly hopeful that
we may prove heroes also.

We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser matters.
Here is the door, here is the open air. Itur in antiquam
silvam.

-152-