This semi-barbaric king had a daughter who fell in love with a handsome young courtier.  When the king discovered this love-affair he cast the youth into prison and had his realm searched for the fiercest of tigers.  The day came when the prisoner had to decide his own fate in the arena by opening one of the doors.  The princess, who was one of the spectators, had succeeded, with the aid of gold, in discovering the secret of the doors; she knew from which the tiger, from which the lady, would issue.  She knew, too, who the lady was behind the other door—­one of the loveliest of the damsels of the court—­one who had dared to raise her eyes to her loved one and had thereby aroused her fiercest jealousy.  She had thought the matter over, and was prepared for action.  The king gave the signal, and the courtier appeared.  He had expected the princess to know on which side lay safety for him, nor was he wrong.  To his quick and anxious glance at her, she replied by a slight, quick movement of her arm to the right.  The youth turned, and without the slightest hesitation opened the door on the right.  Now, “which came out of the opened door—­the lady or the tiger?”

THE LADY AND THE TIGER

With that question Stockton ends his story, and it is generally supposed that he does not answer it.  But he does, on the preceding page, in these words: 

“Think of it, fair reader, not as if the decision of the question depended upon yourself, but upon that hot-blooded, semi-barbaric princess, her soul at white heat beneath the combined fires of despair and jealousy.  She had lost him, but who should have him?”

In these words the novelist hints plainly enough that the question was decided by a sort of dog-in-the-manger jealousy.  If the princess could not have him, certainly her hated rival should never enjoy his love.  The tiger, we may be sure, was behind the door on the right.

In allowing the tiger to devour the courtier, the princess showed that her love was of the primitive, barbarous type, being in reality self-love, not other-love.  She “loved” the man not for his own sake, but only as a means of gratifying her desires.  If he was lost to her, the tiger might as well dine on him.  How differently an American girl would have acted, under the impulse of romantic love!  Not for a moment could she have tolerated the thought of his dying, through her fault—­the thought of his agony, his shrieks, his blood.  She would have sacrificed her own happiness instead of her beloved’s life.  The lady would have come out of the door opened by him.  Suppose that, overcome by selfish jealousy, she acted otherwise; and suppose that an amphitheatre full of cultured men and women witnessed her deed:  would there not be a cry of horror, condemning her as worse than the tiger, as absolutely incapable of the feeling of true love?  And would not this cry of horror reveal on the part of the spectators an instinctive perception of the truth which this chapter, this whole book, is written to enforce, that voluntary self-sacrifice, where called for, is the supreme, the infallible, test of love?