also to his temperament, is seized with a thousand misgivings, and there is no more ample, original, and masterly presentation of a case of conscience, that in civil war is always common enough, than the struggle through which Gauvain passes before he can resolve to deliver Lantenac.  This pathetic debate—­“the stone of Sisyphus, which is only the quarrel of man with himself”—­turns on the loftiest, broadest, most generous motives, touching the very bases of character, and reaching far beyond the issue of ’93.  The political question is seen to be no more than a superficial aspect of the deeper moral question.  Lantenac, the representative of the old order, had performed an exploit of signal devotion.  Was it not well that one who had faith in the new order should show himself equally willing to cast away his life to save one whom self-sacrifice had transformed from the infernal Satan into the heavenly Lucifer?

“Gauvain saw in the shade the sinister smile of the sphinx.  The situation was a sort of dread crossway where the conflicting truths 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