swims with a heavy fragrance; and though one feels
that the artist's hand failed to represent his thought, he was painting
with a desperate intentness, and the dark quality of the conception
contrives to struggle out. The art of it is great rather than good; it
is the art of a man who realises the scene with a terrible insight, and
in spite of a clumsy and smudgy handling, manages to bring it home
perhaps even more impressively than if he had been fully master of his
medium. There is a mingling of horror and pathos over it all, and the
pretty, innocent gaiety of the children seems obscured as by a
gathering thunder-cloud; as when the air grows close and still over
some scene of rustic merriment, and the blitheness of the revellers
sinks into torpor and faintness, not knowing what ails them. One feels
that the performers of the dance will be rewarded with kisses and
sweetmeats, and that they will draw the poison into their souls.

It is surely very difficult to analyse what this shadow of sin upon the
world may be, because there is so large an element of subjectivity
mingled with it. So much of it seems to depend upon the temper and
beliefs of the time, so much of the shadow of conscience to be the fear
of social and even legal penalty. Not to travel far for instances, one
finds Plato speaking in a guileless and romantic fashion of a whole
range of passions and emotions that we have grown to consider as
inherently degrading and repulsive. Yet no shadow of the sense of sin
seems to have brooded over that bright and clear Greek life, the
elements of which, except in the regions which our morality condemns,
seem so intensely desirable and ennobling. In ages, too, when life was
more precarious, and men were so much less sensitive to the idea of
human suffering, one finds a light-hearted cruelty practised which is
insupportable to modern ideals. Those wars of extermination among the
Israelites, when man and woman, boy and girl, were ruthlessly and
sternly slain, because they were held to belong to some tribe abhorred
by the God of Sabaoth; or when, in their own polity, some notorious
sinner was put to death with all his unhappy family, however
innocent--no shadow of conscience seems to have brooded over those
destroyers: they rather had the inspiriting and ennobling sense of
having performed a sacred duty, and carried out the commands of a
jealous God. Viewing the matter, indeed, as dispassionately and
philosophically as poss