acter in a Greek tragedy.

This novel was followed by another, _The Heart of Life_, which was more
or less constructed on the same lines, and also in response to a similar
dual impulse. The scenery and the setting were those of my own early
days in Devonshire. The home of the principal actors, as there depicted,
is a compound of Glenthorne--I have mentioned its situation already, on
the seaward borders of Exmoor--and of Denbury. Several of the characters
are clergymen with whom I was once familiar. Mixed with these elements
are certain scenes of fashionable life. All these accessories are almost
photographically accurate; and the mere pleasure of reproducing
them--or, as boys would say, the mere fun of reproducing them--was one
of the motives which actuated me in writing this novel and rewriting
it--for most of it was written over and over again. The main action, as
in _A Human Document_, turned on the nature of the affections and the
pangs of unhappy matrimony, these last conducting the two principal
personages to a rest in which the heart of life, self-purified, is
hardly distinguishable from the content of a Christian child's prayer.

A third novel followed. This novel was _The Individualist_, of which the
underlying subject was still the relation of religion to life, but the
subject was handled in a spirit less of emotion than of pure social
comedy. It was suggested by the movement, then beginning to effervesce,
in favor of the rights of women, and by the semi-Socialist hysteria with
which some of its leaders associated it, and in which many of them
thought that they had discovered the foundations of a new faith. The
most prominent character, though she is not in the ordinary sense the
heroine, is Mrs. Norham, an ornament of intellectual Bloomsbury. Having
certain independent means, she is far from being an opponent of private
property as such. Her _bete noire_ is the fashionable or aristocratic
classes, these being the true Antichrist; and she has founded a church
whose main spiritual mission is to instigate an _elite_ of the obscure
and earnest to despise them. By and by she meets some members of this
despicable class herself. Among them is a Tory Prime Minister, who joins
with his sister, an exceedingly fine lady, in expressing a respectful
and profound admiration of her intellect. Mrs. Norham's philosophy of
social religion hereupon undergoes such an appreciable change that she
ultimately finds salvation in wind