A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



there, into five acts. You can put the descrip 

 tive titles to each act just as the dramatists do. 

 There is the first act, the Happy Family; second 

 act, the Estrangement and Temptation; third act, 

 the Suffering and Remorse ; fourth act, the 

 Return ; fifth act, the Merrymaking. There is 

 a shadow flits over it in the brother s envy, and 

 then all ends happily. Out of this fecund little 

 vesicle of a tale, how many thousands of the 

 world s legends have been wrought without ever 

 improving on the subtle simplicity of the original, 

 or broadening the ethical and romantic ground 

 plan of a return. The whole fabric of the peo 

 ple s legendary fiction, from the wandering of 

 Ulysses to the waking of Rip Van Winkle, seems 

 to have been woven upon the postulate of a re 

 turn, and when the imaginations of men tried to 

 fashion the most dreadful of possibilities, they 

 invented the Wandering Jew, for whom there was 

 no return. I wonder how Zola or Bourget would 

 have written the story of the prodigal. What 

 penetration into the customs and manners and 

 hereditary fatalism of the riotous livers ; what 

 accurate and thrilling photographs of the swine; 

 how pathetic the futile attempts of the Prodigal to 

 escape from the seductive determinism of husks, 

 and how admirably he would have failed to arrive 

 at the proper moment, when the father was wait 

 ing for him, because he had blown his brains out 

 or cut his throat with a potsherd on the way. 



^ brother, I prefer the highway.&quot; 

 We descended slowly into a valley, which grew 

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