nd yet so unmistakable.

The two points that I spoke of that he is always trying to work out
in his books are:

(1) the strength of temperament, and the difficulty, almost
impossibility, of altering it. "The most we can do is to register
change," are the first words of his novel. In this book, the
situation of which is not a very unusual one, the hero falls in love
with one of two sisters, of rare personal beauty and attractiveness,
but no particular intellect. He soon wearies of her, being of
that fantastic, weak, discontented spirit which Arthur invariably
portrayed in his heroes--drawing it I can not conceive whence--and
then falls in love with the other, as he ought to have done all
along, being, as she is, fully his match in intellect, and far above
him in heart and strength of character. The wife at the crisis of
this other love, is killed in a street accident, and remorse ensues.
But the book is a weary one; it bears upon its face the burden of
sorrow. "How could this have been otherwise?" is the keynote of the
story.

Along with this, and indeed as a development of this central
principle, is the tendency to treat and write of "sin" so called,
wrong-doing, failure of ideal, as variations of spiritual health, as
diseases, the ravages of which it is possible for the skilful hand
to palliate, but not to cure; to think of and treat sin as a hideous
contagion, which has power for a season, perhaps inherently, to drag
souls within its grasp, involve and overwhelm them; and consequently
to regard the sinner with the deepest sympathy and pity, but with
hardly any anger: in fact, I have known him very seriously offend the
company he has been in, I have even heard him stigmatized as of loose
principles, from his readiness, even anxiety, to condone a sensual
offence in a man of high intellect and brilliant gifts.

"He went wrong," he said very sternly, "through having too much
passion; and that we can judge him, proves that we have not enough.
Well, we shall both of us have to become different: he to be brought
down to the harmonious mean, we to be screwed up to it. It is easy to
see which will be the most painful process: as soon as _he_ gets an
idea of whither he is being led, how thankful he will be for every
pang that teaches him restraint, and purifies; while we--we shall
suffer blind wrench after wrench, _stung_ into feeling at any cost, and
not till we painfully overtop the barrier shall we guess whither we
are