lieve he is not so well instructed in
German as in French history. The scrupulousness which refines his work
gives quality to his narrative, and he can be read with pleasure by
persons of exacting taste. And, again, we might take the case of
Richard Dehan, author of _The Dop Doctor_. That writer is not innocent
of the crudest melodrama. She is diffuse, extravagant, formless. But
she has imagined and created certain characters. She has at moments
touched profoundly that most rudimentary of all emotions--the
war-emotion--an emotion which may be experienced intensely by every
member of an energetic community, and therefore affords the basis of a
real popular art--just as certain universal sentiments afforded the
basis of folk-songs, which were constantly taken up and moulded into
fine artistic forms. _The Dop Doctor_ is a book compounded of vulgar
sensationalism on the one hand, and a strange imaginative vigour and
actuality on the other.

But the sensibility of the crudest and, it is to be feared, the (at
present) largest strata of society can be touched, as we have seen, by
the sheer extravagance of the novel of incident, by action distorted
out of the proportions of life and made astonishing, by violent
assaults upon the reader calculated to arouse him like pistol-shots,
since a more moderate appeal would escape his attention. Just as a
donkey with a hard mouth can only be guided by violent jerks upon the
reins, so a dull sensibility can only be awakened by the harshest
literary appeal. Style in such cases must adapt itself to the subject.
Redundant words are heaped up where one would suffice for the trained
intelligence. A multitude of violent, flamboyant phrases assist to the
excitement of fever. It is possible, indeed, that some rudimentary
art-feeling lurks behind this pandemonium of crude literature, more
probably in cases where lawlessness is the result not of indolence,
but of some sort of vigour and spontaneity. But it should be
remembered that the mimetic impulses in which art among primitive
races is supposed to originate, are not themselves art; and
continually to whet the appetite with such primitive exercises is to
perpetuate the rudimentary condition and stifle the finer faculties.

II. The sentimental absurdities of Pyramus and Thisbe are the occasion
of some apt criticism which Shakespeare puts into the mouths of
Hippolyta and Theseus:

HIPPOLYTA. This is the silliest stuff that e'er I heard.

T