ruths issued and confronted one another, and where the three
supreme ideas of man stood face to face--humanity, the family, the
fatherland. Each of the voices spoke in turn, and each in turn
declared the truth. How choose? Each in turn seemed to hit the
mark of reason and justice, and said, Do that. Was that the thing
to be done? Yes. No. Reasoning counselled one thing; sentiment
another; the two counsels were contradictory. Reasoning is only
reason; sentiment is often conscience; the one comes from man,
the other from a loftier source. That is why sentiment has less
distinctness, and more might. Yet what strength in the severity
of reason! Gauvain hesitated. His perplexity was so fierce. Two
abysses opened before him: to destroy the marquis, or to save him.
Which of these two gulfs was duty?"

The whole scene (ii. 206-219) is a masterpiece of dramatic strength,
sustention, and flexibility--only equalled by the dramatic vivacity of
the scene in which Cimourdain, sitting as judge, orders the prisoner
to be brought forward, to his horror sees Gauvain instead of Lantenac,
and then proceeds to condemn the man whom he loves best on earth to be
taken to the guillotine.

* * * * *

The tragedy of the story, its sombre tone, the overhanging presence of
death in it, are prevented from being oppressive to us by the variety
of minor situation and subordinate character with which the writer has
surrounded the central figures. No writer living is so consummate a
master of landscape, and besides the forest we here have an elaborate
sea-piece, full of the weird, ineffable, menacing suggestion of the
sea in some of her unnumbered moods; and there is a scene of late
twilight on a high solitary down over the bay of Mont Saint-Michel, to
which a reader blessed with sensibility to the subtler impressions of
landscape will turn again and again, as one visits again and again
some actual prospect where the eye procures for the inner sense
a dream of beauty and the incommensurable. Perhaps the palm for
exquisite workmanship will be popularly given, and justly given, to
the episode humorously headed _The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew_,
at the opening of the third volume. It is the story of three little
children, barely out of infancy, awaking, playing, eating, wondering,
slumbering, in solitude through a summer day in an old tower. As a
rule the attempt to make in