204 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 



heroine — from the standpoint of the ordinary man 

 who is not an ophiologist ; the true and the false 

 about the serpent would have been blended in his 

 tale as they exist blended in the popular imagina- 

 tion, and the illusion would have been more perfect 

 and the effect greater. 



Elsie's biographer appears to have found his 

 stock of materials bearing on the main point too 

 slender for his purpose, and to fill out his work he 

 is obliged to be very discursive. Meanwhile, the 

 reader's interest in the chief figure is so intense 

 that in following it the best breakfast-table talk 

 comes in as a mere impertinence. There is no 

 other interest ; among the other personages of the 

 story Elsie appears like a living palpitating being 

 among shadows. One finds it difficult to recall the 

 names of the scholarly father in his library ; the 

 good hero and his lady-love ; the pale school- 

 mistress, and the melodramatic villain on his 

 black horse, to say nothing of the vulgar villagers 

 and the farmer, some of them supposed to be 

 comic. If we except the rattlesnake mountain, 

 and the old nurse with her animal-like affection 

 and fidelity, there is no atmosphere, or, if an 

 atmosphere, one which is certainly wrong and 

 produces a sense of incongruity. A better artist 

 — Hawthorne, to wit — would have used the painful 

 mystery of Elsie's life, and the vague sense of some 

 nameless impending horror, not merely to put 

 sombre patches here and there on an otherwise 

 sunny landscape, but to give a tone to the whole 



