VIII.

It can be said that these incidents of battle are imagined, like
the facts of Vereschagin's pictures, but like these they are
imagined rather below than above the real horror of war, and
represent them inadequately. The incidents of another book, the
last on my list, are of the warfare which goes on in times of
peace, and which will go on as long as there are human passions,
and mankind are divided into men and women, and saints and
sinners. Of all the books on my list, "Let Not Man Put Asunder"
is, narrowing the word to the recognition of the author's
intellectual alertness and vividness, the cleverest. The story
is of people who constantly talk so wonderfully well beyond the
wont even of society people that the utmost skill of the author,
who cannot subdue their brilliancy, is needed to make us feel
their reality. But he does make us feel this in most cases, the
important cases, and in the other cases his power of interesting
us is so great that we do not stop to examine the grounds of our
sensation, or to question the validity of our emotions. The
action, which is positively of to-day, or yesterday at the
furthest, passes in Boston and England, among people of such
great fortune and high rank and transcendent fashion that the
proudest reader cannot complain of their social quality. As to
their moral quality, one might have thought the less said the
better, if the author had not said so much that is pertinent and
impressive. It is from first to last a book with a conscience in
it, and its highest appeal is to the conscience. It is so very
nearly a great book, so very nearly a true book, that it is with
a kind of grief one recognizes its limitations, a kind of