Old Friends and New

IN searching for standards of criticism in fiction, recalling on the one hand the failure of the purely dogmatic formula to meet our need, and, on the other, the kaleidoscopic fashion in which contemporary appreciations shift and veer, one wonders whether an author is not, after all, his own best judge. The lesser achievement, measuring itself by the greater, needs little help from the critic in showing its limitations, while the greater helps set a standard, not only for others but for himself. There is no other judge of a man that quite equals his own best self; there is no other critic at once so just and so severe as his own best work; and the best work of a serious writer of prose fiction is that in which he gives the deepest interpretation of the human spectacle, penetrating beneath the mask of contemporary fashion and custom to the struggle of those spiritual forces that make for human failure or human growth.

In placing the poorer work of some of our contemporary authors side by side with the better, one is sometimes inclined to cry out against the age for the way in which it drags down talent. Why does the author of Peccavi turn to writing clever but mischievous tales of burglar life? Why does the man who could create The Four Feathers begin to write mere detective stories? ¹ That earlier book was a genuine contribution to art, an unusual interpretation of human character, worked out through a plot which kept alive the finer sort of suspense that comes from wondering which way the human will will turn. Countless people are writing detective stories; many can write them worse, and some can write them better than Mr. Mason does. To readers of this species of fiction, who enjoy the clever processes of reasoning by which, in logical succession, the many wrongfully suspected people are eliminated, and attention is fixed on the guilty one, it will prove a disappointment in this story to find that nearly all the suspected people committed the murder. There proves to be one innocent person, but the artistic as well as the ethical balance is better when there proves to be one sinner. Interesting as the book is in many ways in its foreign setting, one cannot help wishing that Mr. Mason would leave to lesser people the mystery and murder stories, and express in his earlier manner his rather remarkable insight into character and his subtle moral sense.

The same kind of criticism may be applied to Mrs. Fitz.² This lively comedy reverses the order of the tottering-kingdom-and-young-hero story, bringing princess, king, and the conspiracy that doth hedge a king, into the quiet atmosphere of an English country house. The book provides harmless amusement, and it is a relief to find, in an English tale, the endless scenes about the inevitable tea-table varied by the introduction of a bit of powder and shot; but one cannot help wishing that Mr. Snaith could see how much more original, how much better of its kind, was Broke of Covenden than is his lighter work, be it historical comedy, pseudo-historical, or mere comedy. Except in the case of Nevil Fitzwaren, the rake who becomes the hero of the tale, there is nothing distinctive in the character-study; while the plot is, as has been suggested, only the familiar one of the Prisoner of Zenda turned the other way about.

From Arnold Bennett comes another of his realistic novels,³ so long that they bid fair to be as long as life itself, and yet are full of interest. Again a section of life in one of the Five Towns is presented, dreary, smoky, sordid; and against this background moves Clayhanger’s lad, ‘the spitten image of his poor mother.’ ‘The fat old women . . . who, in child-bed and at grave-sides, had been at the very core of life for long years,’ see, when he passes, only a fresh lad with fair hair and gawky knees and elbows, ‘but they could not see the mysterious and holy flame of desire for self-perfecting blazing within that tousled head.’ Through seven hundred pages he holds your attention as he slowly gives up his plans and hopes, reluctantly abandons his own ambitions and enters his father’s business, loves a woman who unaccountably proves false, and, believing in her throughout, wins her at the end, when life has played with her and cast her off and she brings him only her wrongs. It is apparently a story of slow defeat, wrought inch by inch with terrible thoroughness, yet the last words are, ‘He braced himself to the exquisite burden of life.’

It is a rather fine thing, the art of Arnold Bennett, though one would not be exaggerating in saying that it lacks selective power. He denies himself the spectacular; here is none of the picturesque misery of the slums; here is no vivid rendering of quick sensations, only the endless jogging on along humdrum ways. Slowly the personalities emerge, going the round of their dreary tasks, and as you follow you have no sense of reading a book, only a half-painful, half-pleasant feeling of sharing human experience, difficult in a thousand homely ways. The actual uncertainty of daily life attends you. Was it, or was it not, a pity that the boy had to give up his hope of being an architect? You never know, any more than he did; and the same blind forces seem to carry you forward that carry you on in existence itself. This grim clinging to life and the best one has found in it, though it be but a decent habit, the fashion of stumbling blindly along the trail of old hopes, brings to the reader at times an almost intolerable sense of reality. Maggie, who never suspects her own heroism; Hilda Lessways, revealed to you chiefly through her sympathy with the old Methodist parson, whose only offense against society was that he had forgotten to die; the father, with his hard idealism wrought out in his stationer’s business, are more real than many personages in fiction more vividly sketched; and the father’s illness and death bring before you with almost unendurable pathos the manifold pitifulnesses of life. If, at times, you stop, resenting the author’s power, saying that this is a rendering of experience without faith, without beauty, with no windows left open for the soul; if you cry out against the intolerable thoroughness with which the author seems to represent all of life except the point, you realize, upon longer consideration, that this is an art of submerged ideals, and of faiths that live on unconscious of themselves. After all, Clayhanger is a story of the slow, sure shaping of the clay in the light of a divine idea.

Two comedies, also from the hand of this indefatigable author, appear among the new books: Helen with the High Hand,⁴ and Denry the Audacious,⁵ the former a study of feminine, the latter, of masculine audacity, of power to work one’s will, just the quality lacking in the hero of Clayhanger. Helen with the High Hand has a touch of the artificial in the heroine’s character, suggesting old comedy types; and the best of the book consists in the presentation of the old uncle, with all the minute realism of a Dutch portrait. The second comedy is by far the better of the two, and the account of the hero who knows invariably how to grasp the opportunity of the moment is amusing throughout. How, one wonders, did the Five Towns happen to produce a type which seems American rather than English, possessing in such marked degree the qualities that have led here to success in business and in statesmanship? But the irony of Clayhanger and The Old Wives’ Tale is better than the humor of the lighter stories.

Celt and Saxon,⁶ an unfinished novel found among the papers of George Meredith, has a brilliant opening, with promise of vital delineation of interesting characters. It is, however, fragmentary, and it is impossible, from the chapters left, even to guess at the scheme of the book, or the dramatic relationships of the many personages introduced. It may be that, in the determination to contrast, in as many ways as possible, the impulsive and imaginative Celt with the steadier and more dogmatic Saxon, the story would have suffered. Certainly, the latter part, as it now stands, is more a disquisition with illustrations, than a story, and the sadness of realizing that this is the last work to come from the great author is tempered by the fear that his brilliant rendering of human beings, alive and capable of growth, would have been henceforward vivid in moments only. It is with deep regret that we say farewell to the only one of our great novelists in whose work a knowledge of evolution was real and vital as part and parcel of his being, the very condition of his perception. In George Eliot’s novels, the knowledge of the newly discovered scientific laws lies side by side, in solid blocks, with the creative parts of the work; in Meredith it is subtly back of all perception and of all imaginative creation, so that his characters, to an extent unprecedented in fiction, seem directly related to the mainspring of life.

In several of the Tales of Men and Ghosts⁷ the psychological subtleties of Mrs. Wharton’s art are carried into the realm of illusion, or even into the dim border-lands of insanity. There is one real ghost story, ‘Afterward,’ which achieves the prime object of its species in making you believe in the ghost; while in ‘ The Eyes,’ a haunting illusion, described by its victim, suddenly betrays a crisis in the life of one of the listeners. For sheer cleverness, ‘The Bolted Door ’ perhaps stands out as the best in the book. It is a story of apparent insanity, centring in a delusion of murder; the circumstantial accounts of the murderer, growing more and more improbable as he tries to confess to one person after another, become evidence of growing insanity, — only to prove true at the end. The shrewd handling of the intricate mazes of thought in this incipient mental unbalancing are admirable, and here, as in all the tales, we have the mastery of a story-teller who knows how to manage her climaxes.

Mrs. Wharton’s skill in handling her material, the balance, measure, restraint of her work, are too well recognized to need comment. It is a pleasure to watch her unfolding of a story, the deft way in which descriptive phrase, unobtrusive incident, and bit of conversation play into one another’s hands, until the working of the inner life stands fully revealed. Here, as is usual, we have that indefinable atmosphere of satire, pungent, purifying, if not always satisfying. In one or two stories of the group we have something deeper than satire, as in ‘ The Debt,’an all-too-brief tale, having the technical skill of the others and something more. This analysis of the mind and heart of a man on the advance wave of modern thought brings one a longing for more work of this kind from the author’s hand. The finer sense of honor recorded here, the passion for truth that burns through all else, leave one with the hope that our immense gain in outer matters, mere material matters, mere knowledge of external things, has not meant, as so many would have it, retrogression for the soul. Another phase of the new morality shows, with a bit less of originality than in ‘The Debt,’ in ‘The Blond Beast.’ In both, the positive note somewhat shames the lighter, cleverer, merely satiric work of this gifted author. If she can discern in this fashion the underlying forces making for truth and righteousness, discern with an insight granted to but few, why is not more of her work constructive, positive, instead of negative? Why does she not write a tale of the height and scope of The House of Mirth, designed to build up where that tore down? The least of us can satirize, can see many of the things that are wrong with the world, though few can tell with such skill the tale of the things that are wrong; but few, perhaps, can detect, in the rush and stir of modern life, sweeping our old ideals away, the presence of permanent sources of consolation, of hope, of self-respect for the rapidly advancing race. One wishes that ‘The Debt’ were a three-volumed novel, that it might outweigh the desolating influence of The House of Mirth.

The idealism that sets high the prizes of life and of art, as high as the artist’s best endeavor, and high above mere success of the market-place, is always welcome, and is rare enough to-day. In The Creators⁸ we enter an atmosphere of straining after high achievement; and we find that, in many ways, the young, who are trying to win the prizes of the world unseen, are good company. And yet, the new book by the author of The Divine Fire is disappointing. There is an immaturity about it, and a lack of that rather profound wisdom that made The Divine Fire so unusual. Youthfulness of mood is refreshing, but not always satisfying, and an air of unripeness marks this book, in which each character thinks himself or herself a genius, and recognizes geniuses in all his friends. England has not in a century produced so many geniuses as walk through the pages of this book, and the word is repeated with a distressing frequency that makes one wonder what the author means by it. It is a surprise to come upon something so akin to the callowness of spirit of the young German Romanticists in the work of a writer capable of such severe analysis as Miss May Sinclair. The lack of measure, of judgment, is apparent in many ways, and nowhere more apparent than in the snobbishness voicing itself in the outcry of the geniuses against the ‘dreadful, clever little people.’

The immaturity of spirit is reflected in the workmanship. There is a lack of centralization; it is everybody’s story; it is nobody’s story. That power of developing a central character, so amazingly good in The Divine Fire, is absent from The Creators, and one turns back to the earlier book with a feeling of satisfaction that, whatever present or future brings from this gifted writer, she has the permanent satisfaction of having produced a masterpiece.

One must approach the work ⁹ of Mr. Henry Janies with all the respect due to our master of fiction, who has, for many years, held a great part of our discriminating public in an attitude of unquestioning discipleship, and whose influence is stronger than any other upon several of our cleverest younger writers of fiction. Many of those unable to assume the role of disciples are silent in their doubt, so potent is this author’s name; and we have grown to accept, as one of the conventions of our criticism, a belief that his work stands upon an almost impossibly high level. Yet, if I may speak out boldly, much of the later work rouses question in my mind, question in regard to the depth of its interpretative power; and more than one tale leaves an impression, both as regards theme and style, of a straining after effect that does not belong to the highest artistic achievement.

The power of the earlier work is not difficult to recognize; the power of dealing with the apparently trivial, as in Daisy Miller, and of making it the medium of large interpretations; the appealing power of a delicate and subtle character-study, as in The Portrait ofa Lady. I cannot help feeling that the balance has been slowly changing in Mr. James’s work, more and more of the sensational in situation and in style creeping into it, more and more of the trivial that is merely trivial, and that has not larger interpretations to offer. What Maisie Knew exemplifies the point; so, surely, does part of The Golden Bowl; so do some of the stories in this new book, especially the first one, ‘The Velvet Glove,’ whose central plot is this, that the gifted American author, instead of praising the work of the novelist bearing the pseudonym Amy Evans, kisses her. The second story, ‘Mora Montravers,’ gives you the character-sketch of a girl of modern type, independent and audacious, against a background of old-fashioned conventions. She is never directly presented, and it is only by combining, with the author’s help, the various somewhat distorted reflections in her relatives’ minds, eliminating, and setting straight, that you get an idea of her. ‘The Bench of Desolation’ is a clever study of some of the ironies of the human affections; the ‘ Round of Visits ’ is perhaps the best of the tales, with its sudden, illuminating flash of character-contrasts; and here the disproportion between matterand manner is not so apparent as in the others.

It requires courage to challenge the style of Mr. James, who so long has stood as the master that we take for granted in all that comes from his pen a masterfulness. Delicate shades of thought and of feeling are his province, and he is granted subtlety of style that expresses the exact nuances he wishes to convey. Granted those qualities of delicacy, distinction, and quiet charm which characterize innumerable passages in his work, what is Mr. James doing with expressions like these, dealing with minor situations? ‘With the sense somehow that there were too many things, and that they were all together, terribly, irresistibly, doubtless blessedly in her eyes and her own person.’ ‘The logic of his having so tremendously ceased, in the shape of his dark storm-gust, to be engaged to another woman.’ ‘Her motive, in fine, disconcerting, deplorable, dreadful in respect to the experience otherwise so boundless.’ ‘The adventure that . . . he would have been all so stupidly, all so gallantly, and, by every presumption, so prevailingly ready for.’ ‘This so prodigiously different, beautiful and dreadful truth’; ‘idiotized surrender’; ‘inordinately’; ‘betrayingly,’ ‘tinglingly,’ ‘tortuously,’ ‘immensely exposed and completely abashed,’ — pages bristle with expressions like these.

Delicate shadings of thought are not usually brought out by such highly colored adjectives and adverbs. The great artist is known always by the measure and the mastery of his style; he saves the great word for the great moment,and thegreat word, which suggests the depth of human experience, is characterized by its power of suggestion rather than by its violence. Mr. James, in ‘The Velvet Glove,’amuses himself with the style of Amy Evans’s book, a commonplace love-story of the superlative type, but her vocabulary, with its ‘ passionate,’ its ‘ flowering land,’ its ‘blighting desolation,’ is no more extreme than his own, though his words are more far-sought. Is he not doing just that which he accuses Amy Evans of doing, straining to make the moment assume greater significance than it has, lashing adjective and adverb to a fictitious value? The story which he is writing and the story at which he is laughing are both, though in widely different spheres, lacking in that simplicity and sincerity which are the marks of genuine art.

A reviewer in a recent magazine challenges the reader to produce another author whose processes of thought are so labyrinthine, who can express so many shades and phases of human feeling. At times I cannot help wondering if the thought is really as labyrinthine as the expression. Does not the ambiguity that results from a brigand lawlessness in the fashioning of sentences cause often a look of intricacy of thought which vanishes upon closer consideration? ‘That would be an answer, however, he continued intensely to see, only to inanely importunate, to utterly superfluous Amy Evans — not a bit to his at last exquisitely patient companion, who was clearly now quite taking it from him that what kept him in his attitude was the spring of the quick desire to oblige her, the charming loyal impulse to consider a little what he could do for her, say “ handsomely yet conscientiously” (oh, the loveliness!) before he should commit himself.’

In kindly spirit we may grant much of license to this master of unchallenged position, whose whims lead him to most individual views in regard to the parts of speech, and whose relative pronouns may or not emerge from these sentenceheaps to attach themselves to the right nouns, but surely we are not bound to consider this a great style, or even a good style. Measure, balance, lucidity,— these qualities are not too much to ask of the prose style of great masters of English, and the spell of a great name should not keep us from recognizing the lack of these qualities in Mr. James’s later work. Few can doubt the value and the charm of his long line of character-interpretations of national and of international interest. Can any readers who recall the clarity of the earlier style deny that for Mr. James to rewrite his earlier work in his later manner is almost a national calamity?

A novel of great originality and depth comes to us in Hearts Contending,¹⁰ by Georg Schock, who has heretofore been known only as a writer of short stories dealing, as does this work, with Pennsylvania Germans. This is a tale of primitive lives and passions, among a people shut away in their mountain valley from the stream of modern life. Its basic idea is that of the Book of Job, and the tale is in many ways almost as primitive as the Book of Job. The slow and powerful unfolding of the story compels the deepest interest; more and more the reader finds himself in the grip of real tragedy, brought about, not by external causes, but by natural human feeling and innocent human motives. Not every writer of tragedy has, combined with such deep insight into the causes of human trouble, so much balance and moderation of judgment. The way in which, after the many-sided, fatal misunderstandings, all slowly rights itself, has something of the slow sanity of Nature’s very self.

The author of this book betrays the rare combination of the power to observe with the power to think out the results of observation; too many realists have an excess of the former gift, and crowd their fiction with insignificant details. Here every touch picturing the people, their customs, and their background has interpretative power, and relates itself to the underlying idea of the book. Moreover, there is a genuinely poetic quality in the natureinterpretations, whereby you are permitted to see the gray sweep of the Blaueberg, the green Heiligthal, and to share the color and the mystery of spring, the depth of life in summer days. A Homeric simplicity and dignity attend the life; husband and wife salute each other from opposite sides of the kitchen like a pair of friendly sovereigns meeting, and the son Anthony, emerging from the gray mist, riding his white steed and leading a pair of gray roans, is worthy to stand by the heroes who fought about Troy.

So simple and natural are the people that we find ourselves, in watching them, doubly bewildered that life should so cast its net to entangle them. Job, the house father, and Susanna his wife; Anthony, the eldest son; Jonathan, who, drawn by the smell of the earth and the love of a girl, gives up the ministry and breaks his parents’ hearts, are brought before us by simple and vivid touches; and two of the characters, the son Jesse, and Bertha, who innocently starts all the trouble, are made still more real by means of that subtler fashion of suggestion, of tracing their effect upon other people.

The language of these people strikes one as being a bit stilted and overcorrect. Though this gives an effect of quaint dignity which in certain ways suits the majestic story, and is a relief after the over-insistence and dialect in other tales, it detracts in certain ways from the naturalness that attends everything else in the book. In spite of this defect, the author’s style shows unusual restraint, and unusual suggestive power, not in mere epigram or in intellectual snap-shots, but in brief and pregnant sayings that sum up an immense amount of experience and of wisdom regarding life.

There is a tonic quality, a tonic reality about the book, and one will go far in the new fiction without finding anything to equal it in picturesque reality and simplicity. Nowhere else, among the new books, are there scenes of such tragic power as that of the quarrel in the harvest field, or of the chapter giving Anthony’s revenge, ending with the scene where Job took his dead son on his back, ‘ reversing the way of generations,’ and carried him to the top and over the slope, along the road toward home.

The season’s output of fiction brings before us many interesting phases of American life. The Married Life of the Frederick Carrolls¹¹ presents the domestic difficulties and adventures of a young artist and his wife in a somewhat alien suburban atmosphere. The tales are at once humorous and thoughtful, and there is a refreshing originality about the two young folk, who face the world-old situation with their minds full of new ideas and questions. The frank speech of a newer day strengthens the bond between them, as the struggle to carry out an artist’s ideals in a material and mechanical civilization strengthens the man’s hold on his art. One might perhaps plead with the author not to explain so fully at times by reflective comment that which his own deft turning of the narrative has already explained; but one would not quarrel with work so full of vitality, in which very real people face the facts of life with courage, and with eyes wide open.

It is a pleasure to find Richard Harding Davis returning, in his book of short stories,¹² to his earlier manner, which many of his readers prefer to his later style in the stories of romantic adventure. Most of these new tales, simple in motif and in execution, emphasize the permanent and genuine in human affection, and certain clear distinctions between right and wrong. Several play pleasantly, in the fashion which the author likes, on moral ideals made a bit more piquant by social contrasts, and here and there, as in some of the earlier work, the social contrast is made more important than the moral issue.

The Prodigious Hickey¹³ and The Varmint,¹⁴ by Owen Johnson, give lively pictures of American boys at boarding school, and are, in many ways, amusing enough. Various types are vigorously represented, and the practical jokes, the inexhaustible spirits, the worship of physical courage make the pictures seem, to those who knowboys, true to life. The notices that state kinship between this work and Tom Brown’s’ School-Days at Rugby are, however, misleading, and rouse misgiving. There are plenty of hard knocks in ‘Tom Brown,’ and there is much emphasis on the passion for tarts and the love of jokes; but all through, you are aware of shaping forces: the school trains the boys, and the reader can feel, through the roughand-tumble deeds, the influences making them gentlemen, holding up a high sense of honor, and leading the ideals of school-boy pluck to finer issues. Here, there is nothing of this; the authorities are mere ciphers. Lucius Cassius, the professor of Latin, has methods so outgrown and pedantic that the intellectual part of the school life must be, if he represents its best, worse than useless. Of moral influence from the elders there is as little as of intellectual, and though the lads have a rough-and-ready code of their own, it sadly needs strengthening. In Hickey’s selling to his comrades the silver clappers as if they were genuine souvenirs of the missing college bell, and earning much money thereby, there is a touch of American business trickery that would be below the English boy’s sense of honor. If the American boy in school is as absolutely unrestrained as this would seem to indicate, the schools sadly need reform; for football, though it undoubtedly has its uses, can hardly serve as the one and only civilizing force brought to bear upon the young.

Among the books are certain local studies, some by people with wellknown names, some by new-comers, representing different degrees of artistic and interpretative value.

Opal,¹⁵ a tale of common life and folk in the middle west, is a racy account of character and event, with more substance than its name would imply. The shrewd turns of characterization betray a nice sense of humor, and much insight into the quips and cranks of human nature, which, in this author’s gentle philosophy, are but minor discords in the music of humanity. If a bit too much of the obviously didactic sways conversation, incident, and character; if some of the characters turn almost too suddenly from hard feelings to kindly deeds, at least the author is aware of the actual motives of change and the depths from which they sprung.

Jim Hands,¹⁶ a tale of a factory town, is the story of the love of the proprietor’s son for a daughter of one of the employees. While it has many of the conventional features of its type, it digs down much deeper than the ordinary dialect story into the sources and meaning of our democracy; and the scene where the elderly Irish woman gives the governor her opinions on corrupt politics, is enough to revive fading hopes in regard to the permanency of a republic. The wit and wisdom of the book, though poured out too lavishly at first, too sparingly at the last, are real wit and real wisdom.

Just Folks,¹⁷ is a series of sketches of life in a poor quarter of Chicago, from the point of view of a young woman who is acting as truant officer. It is valuable in bringing to the reader a sense of the complexities of life in such a quarter, where many nationalities and countless temperaments are jostling one another. The fact that the book is not fitted to a certain theme, cutting off all other issues, lends it a certain effectiveness, as it permits the author to present the many daily crises of life in their human rather than in their artistic relationship. The story of lost Angela Ann is full of deep significance; and the picture of Mary Casey, her mother, with the indomitable Irish love enfolding sinning daughter, erring son, and vagabond husband, is beautifully wrought. The book is full of concrete suggestions and incidents, which, bringing the lives of the submerged vividly before us, may set many minds at work, and at work hopefully, upon some of our innumerable social problems.

Regarding a record, as terrible as that contained in The House of Bondage,¹⁸ of a side of life not usually confessed, comments on art or lack of art would be almost as great an impertinence as discussion of æsthetic values in the cloud-effects of the judgment day. Yet, if these things are true, and the quiet massing of detail carries conviction with it, this presentation of the most cruel of all the cruel human tragedies of our modern life cannot be ignored. Suffice it to say that this story of the traffic in the bodies and the souls of women is told with high dignity, and, in spite of its full revelations, a certain reserve. There is close centralization, and all the network of political chicanery and corruption, all the many manifestations of unscrupulous greed, are closely interwoven about the central figure of the one helpless girl. She is all the more appealing because there is nothing especially notable about her; she has no unusual power or grace; she is only one of the many victims of what we call our civilization; and one follows with increasing horror the Nemesis worked out in the story, as a fate worse than the worst of Greek tragedy becomes the consequence of an initial slight mistake. The book is, primarily, an arraignment of men, but there is another side also, best expressed, perhaps, in the words of one of Olive Schreiner’s Dreams: —

’I thought I stood in Heaven before God’s throne, and God asked me what I had come for. I said I had come to arraign my brother, Man.

‘God said, “What has he done?”

‘I said, “He has taken my sister, Woman, and has stricken her, and wounded her, and thrust her out into the streets; she lies there prostrate. His hands are red with blood. I am here to arraign him, that the kingdom be taken from him, because he is not worthy, and given unto me. My hands are pure.”

‘I showed them.

‘God said, “Thy hands are pure. Lift up thy robe.”

‘I raised it; my feet were red, bloodred, as if I had trodden in wine.

‘God said, “How is this?”

’I said, “Dear Lord, the streets on earth are full of mire. If I should walk straight on in them my outer robe might be bespotted; you see how white it is! Therefore I pick my way.”

‘God said, “On what?”

‘I was silent, and I let my robe fall. I wrapped my mantle about my head. I went out softly. I was afraid that the angels would see me.’