don’t cry!  Oh, don’t be sad!” he roars, unable still to deal with his own passionate anger, which is still dealing with him.  With his kicks of rage he suddenly mingles a dance of apprehension lest his mother should have tears in her eyes.  Even while he is still explicitly impenitent and defiant he tries to pull her round to the light that he may see her face.  It is but a moment before the other passion of remorse comes to make havoc of the helpless child, and the first passion of anger is quelled outright.

Only to a trivial eye is there nothing tragic in the sight of these great passions within the small frame, the small will, and, in a word, the small nature.  When a large and sombre fate befalls a little nature, and the stage is too narrow for the action of a tragedy, the disproportion has sometimes made a mute and unexpressed history of actual life or sometimes a famous book; it is the manifest core of George Eliot’s story of Adam Bede, where the suffering of Hetty is, as it were, the eye of the storm.  All is expressive around her, but she is hardly articulate; the book is full of words—­preachings, speeches, daily talk, aphorisms, but a space of silence remains about her in the midst of the story.  And the disproportion of passion—­the inner disproportion—­is at least as tragic as that disproportion of fate and action; it is less intelligible, and leads into the intricacies of nature which are more difficult than the turn of events.

It seems, then, that this passionate play is acted within the narrow limits of a child’s nature far oftener than in those of an adult and finally formed nature.  And this, evidently, because there is unequal force at work within a child, unequal growth and a jostling of powers and energies that are hurrying to their development and pressing for exercise and life.  It is this helpless inequality—­this untimeliness—­that makes the guileless comedy mingling with the tragedies of a poor child’s day.  He knows thus much—­that life is troubled around him and that the fates are strong.  He implicitly confesses “the strong hours” of antique song.  This same boy—­the tempestuous child of passion and revolt—­went out with quiet cheerfulness for a walk lately, saying as his cap was put on, “Now, mother, you are going to have a little peace.”  This way of accepting his own conditions is shared by a sister, a very little older, who, being of an equal and gentle temper, indisposed to violence of every kind and tender to all without disquiet, observes the boy’s brief frenzies as a citizen observes the climate.  She knows the signs quite well and can at any time give the explanation of some particular outburst, but without any attempt to go in search of further or more original causes.  Still less is she moved by the virtuous indignation that is the least charming of the ways of some little girls. Elle ne fait que constater.  Her equanimity has never been overset by the wildest of his moments, and she has witnessed them all.  It is needless to say that she is not frightened by his drama, for Nature takes care that her young creatures shall not be injured by sympathies.  Nature encloses them in the innocent indifference that preserves their brains from the more harassing kinds of distress.