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 denouement. 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 Fouque, 

 which so many have followed since his time — the 

 childish " Now-I-have-got-a-soul " transformation 

 scene with which Fouque himself spoilt one of the 

 most beautiful things ever written. The end is not 



