206 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
like, perennial in interest as Nature itself, and 
Nature’s serpent. 
If it had only been left for ever unfinished, or 
had ended differently! For it is impossible for 
one who admires it to pardon the pitifully common- 
place and untrue dénowement. Never having read 
a review of the book I do not know what the 
professional critic or the fictionist would say on 
this point; he might say that the story could not 
properly have ended differently; that, from an 
artistic point of view, it was necessary that the 
girl should be made to outgrow the malign influence 
which she had so strangely inherited; that this 
was rightly brought about by making her fall in 
love with the good and handsome young school- 
master—the effect of the love, or “dull ache of 
passion,” being so great as to deliver and kill her 
at the same time. 
If the interest of the story had all been in the 
dull and pious villagers, their loves and marriages 
and trivial affairs, then it would have seemed right 
that Elsie, who made them all so uncomfortable, 
should be sent from the village, which was no 
place for her, to Heaven by the shortest and most 
convenient route. Miserably weak is that dying 
scene with its pretty conventional pathos; the 
ending somewhat after the fashion set by Fouqué, 
which so many have followed since his time—the 
childish ‘‘ Now-I-have-got-a-soul” transformation 
scene with which Fouqué himself spoilt one of the 
most beautiful things ever written. The end is not 
