Sooner or later she lays us low,
And all of us fall beneath her blow.
Now let us part, and I'm not loth,
Come not again, or 'twere worse for both;
But if thou dost a spell shall fall.
That will hide from thee giants, city, and all."
Thor waxed wrath, and seized his mace,
But Loki had vanished, nor left a trace.
When Thor strode back to storm the town,
He only found a bare lone down.

THE SENSATIONAL WILLIAMS.

CONTEMPORARY criticism has recently been
deformed by a species of cant, which, originating,
as cant generally does, in a sincere feeling
on the part of a few, has been echoed by the
many simply because it is an effective cry. If
any one writes a novel, a play, or a poem, which
relates anything out of the ordinary experiences
of the most ordinary people—some tragedy of
love or revenge, some strange (though not
impossible) combination of events, or some romance
of guilt and misery—he is straightway met with
a loud exclamation of "Sensational!" This
foolish word has become the orthodox stone for
flinging at any heretic author who is bold enough
to think that life has its tremendous passes of
anguish and crime, as well as its little joys and
little sorrows—its strange adventures and
vicissitudes, as well as its daily progresses from
Brixton to the Bank, and from the Bank back
again to Brixton; and who holds that the more
vividly-coloured part of the grouping is as
legitimate a subject for artistic treatment as the
more drab-hued section. But the anti-
sensational critic will tell you that, if you would
write a novel or a play that is fit to be read by
any one with tastes superior to those of a butcher-
boy, you must confine yourself strictly to the
common events of common lives, have nothing
whatever to say to any of the extremes of passion
or of action, leave murder to the penny papers,
be ignorant of suicide, have no idea that there are
dark shadows in the world, and shun a mystery
as you would the measles. In short, let Brixton
be your standard, the Alps being among Nature's
"spasms," and therefore very improper subjects
for respectable authors. Moreover, in relating
the even tenor of Brixtonian existence, be careful
that you are never betrayed into any emotion
of style—any throb or pulse of passion in your
language, any glow of description or rapid
development of action—on pain of being taken to
task for having shown "hectic" and "feverish"
symptoms. When you have fulfilled all these
conditions, then will the organs of Brixtonian
criticism smile on you, and declare that you
have composed "a very sweet, natural,
unaffected, and thoroughly healthy tale, inexpressibly
refreshing in these days of exaggerated
sentiment and spasmodic plot."

Now, there can be no doubt that very beautiful
and interesting fictions may be made, and
have been made, out of the simplest elements of
every-day life. The commonest threads of the
woof of humanity have that in their composition
which is capable of enlisting the sympathies of
all of us; and when the humour and pathos of
the most unromantic lives are drawn forth by
the subtle touch of genius, we hail the result by
involuntary laughter and tears. But why is all
art to be restricted to the uniform level of quiet
domesticity? To say nothing of the supernatural
regions of imagination and fancy, the
actual world includes something more than the
family life; something besides the placid
emotions that are developed about the paternal
hearth-rug. It has its sterner, its wilder, and
its vaster aspects; adventures, crimes, agonies;
hot rage and tumult of passions; terror, and
bewilderment, and despair. Why is the literary
artist to be shut out from the tragedy of existence,
as he sees it going on around him? Why
is it necessarily immoral to shadow forth the
awful visitations of wrath and evil and punishment,
or to depict those wonderful and unwonted
accidents of fortune which are just as real as
anything that happens between Brixton and the
Bank, only of less frequent occurrence? It is
very easy to cry "Sensational!" but the word
proves nothing. Let it be granted that such things
are sensational; but then life itself is similarly
sensational in many of its aspects, and Nature
is similarly sensational in many of her forms,
and art is always sensational when it is tragic.
The Å’dipus of Sophocles is in the highest degree
sensational; so are half the plays of Shakespeare,
at a moderate computation; so is the Satan of
Paradise Lost; so is Raphael's Massacre of the
Innocents; so is the Laocoon; so, one may say,
are the Oratorios of Handel, since they deal
with tremendous elements of suffering and
wonderment, of aspiration and triumph. Whenever
humanity wrestles with the gods of
passion and pain, there, of necessity, is that
departure from our diurnal platitudes which the
cant of existing criticism denounces by this
single word. It is quite true that there is a
vulgar species of sensationalism, than which
nothing can be worse. The halfpenny tales of
murder and felony, of which a deluge is usually
being poured forth, are really demoralising; for
the difference between an artist who can look
into the psychology of crime and terror, and the
botcher who can do nothing more than lay on
the carmine with a liberal brush, is so great as
to be essential. In a smaller degree, it is the
difference between the old playwright who,
ending his tragedy with a scene of general
massacre, directs "that the dead bodies and
scattered limbs are to lie about the stage "as
bloodie as may be," and the great poet who
says, through the mouth of his murderous
king:

                               I am in blood
  Stept in so far that, should I wade no more,
  Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
  .   .   .   .    I have supp'd full with horrors:
  Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
  Cannot once start me.

The mystery of evil is as interesting to us
now as it was in the time of SHAKESPEARE and
it is downright affectation or effeminacy to say