DOMUS ANGUSTA


The narrow house is a small human nature compelled to a large human
destiny, charged with a fate too great, a history too various, for its
slight capacities. Men have commonly complained of fate; but their
complaints have been of the smallness, not of the greatness, of the human
lot. A disproportion--all in favour of man--between man and his destiny
is one of the things to be taken for granted in literature: so frequent
and so easy is the utterance of the habitual lamentation as to the
trouble of a 'vain capacity,' so well explained has it ever been.

'Thou hast not half the power to do me harm
That I have to be hurt,'

discontented man seems to cry to Heaven, taking the words of the brave
Emilia. But inarticulate has been the voice within the narrow house.
Obviously it never had its poet. Little elocution is there, little
argument or definition, little explicitness. And yet for every vain
capacity we may assuredly count a thousand vain destinies, for every
liberal nature a thousand liberal fates. It is the trouble of the wide
house we hear of, clamorous of its disappointments and desires. The
narrow house has no echoes; yet its pathetic shortcoming might well move
pity. On that strait stage is acted a generous tragedy; to that
inadequate soul is intrusted an enormous sorrow; a tempest of movement
makes its home within that slender nature; and heroic happiness seeks