an early point. The gist throughout is the
tempering and purifying of the character and disposition of Morgex
himself, through trial and love, through crime and sacrifice. It is not
perfectly done. If it were, it would land the author at once in those
upper regions of art which I cannot say I think he attains. But it is a
very remarkable "try," and, with one other to be mentioned presently, it
is nearest the goal of any of his books.

[Sidenote: _Le Silence._]

On the other hand, if he ever wrote a worse book than _Le Silence_, I
have not read, and I do not wish to read, that. The title is singularly
unhappy. Silence is so much greater a thing than speech that a speaker,
unless he is Shakespeare or Dante or Lucretius,[551] or at least the
best kind of Wordsworth, had better avoid the subject, avoid even the
word for it. And M. Rod's examples of silence, preluded in each case
(for the book has two parts) by one of those curious harbingerings of
his which are doubtfully satisfactory, are not what they call nowadays
"convincing." The first and longest--it is, indeed, much too long and
might have been more acceptable in twenty pages than in two
hundred--deals with the usual triangle--brutal husband, suffering wife,
interesting lover. But the last two never declare themselves, or are
declared; and they both die and make no sign. In the second part there
is another triangle, where the illegitimate side is established and
results in a duel, the lover killing the husband and establishing
himself with the wife. But a stove for tea-making explodes; she loses
her beauty, and (apparently for that reason) poisons herself, though it
does not appear that her lover's love has been affected by the change.
In each case the situation comes under that famous and often-quoted ban
of helpless and unmanageable misery.

[Sidenote: _La-Haut._]

Nor can I think highly of _La-Haut_, which is quite literally an account
of an Alpine village, and of its gradual vulgarisation by an
enterprising man of business. Of the ordinary novel-interests there is
little more than the introduction at the beginning of a gentleman who
has triangled as usual, till, the husband has, in his, the lover's,
presence, most inconsiderately shot his wife dead, has missed (which was
a pity) M. Julien Sterny himself, and, more unconscionably still, has
been acquitted by a court of justice, in which the officials, and the
public in general, actually seemed to think that M.