Zola. Let us take by way of
example the character next in importance to that of the heroine--the
character of her paramour. A viler figure was never sketched by Balzac;
a viler figure was seldom drawn by Thackeray. But as with Balzac, so
with the author of this play, the masterful will combining with the
masterly art of the creator who fashions out of the worst kind of human
clay the breathing likeness of a creature so hatefully pitiful and so
pitifully hateful overcomes, absorbs, annihilates all sense of such
abhorrence and repulsion as would prove the work which excited them no
high or even true work of art. Even the wonderful touch of dastardly
brutality and pitiful self-pity with which Mosbie at once receives and
repels the condolence of his mistress on his wound--
_Alice_.--Sweet Mosbie, hide thine arm, it kills my heart.
_Mosbie_.--_Ay, Mistress Arden, this is your favour_.--
even this does not make unendurable the scenic representation of what in
actual life would be unendurable for any man to witness. Such an
exhibition of currish cowardice and sullen bullying spite increases
rather our wondering pity for its victim than our wondering sense of her
degradation.
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