MELTING SNOWS.*

Melting Snows is to be classed with the modern romances dealing with phases of spiritual development after conflict, such as those of which Mr. Shorthouse is a master. The story can be read merely as a story, but its author intends those for whom it was written to understand that he is raising a question in which they will be interested. A few words will put us in possession of the point of view from which the writer of Melting Snows departs on his quest for knowledge of the usefulness of emotion. Here is a man, Bent Sorenson, who was perfectly satisfied when he had not the slightest idea of what happiness might be in store for him ; he stands for * Melting Snows. By Prince Sohoenaich-Carolath. Translated into Engliql. by Margaret Symonds. London : J, O. Nimmo. 1895.

examination as a witness ; he is to be asked whether he would have preferred to remain unawakened to a higher life, in which ease he would not have suffered.

Now, to many of us, at one time or another, there must have come a feeling of envy when we have watched not the brave but the unmoved hearts, and have observed those which

neither know patience nor pain. We may not measure another's capacity for emotion, and yet it is obvious that some people feel no more than do lap.dogs when warm and well fed. They are satisfied with themselves, and they simply ignore the rest of the world ; occasionally they catch a glimpse of some person's half.disapproval, which, as applied

to themselves, they do not understand ; and for the rest, all which does not concern their comfort is simply put aside as tiresome, and what is tiresome is irrelevant; they "are not plagued like other men." But what is it to have a responsive soul alive to joy and to sorrow,—one which is strong enough to endure, true enough to recognise itself, generous enough to love ? What is it to have the spiritual perception which drives us on to meet the coming joy, the new idea, the unfold-

ing revelation of the age to be, the personal friendship, the deep passion of life P To be too eager, not to wait till the snows have melted, that is the fate of some of the truest,'

bravest hearts ; like the first buds which burst before the winter is past,—

" They blossomed too rashly, too soon. Truly the green which they bore then was the noblest and the loveliest green of the year. But they sinned against the natural laws of development, and they vanished in the melting snows."

Is it well to awaken too soon? Is it well to awaken at all? The young student, Bent Sorenson, asks this :— " Should the finest thing which is given to us bring destruc-

tion with it ? Don't mock me, George,' he said, and his voice seemed dead to the ear. 'Does not love— a first love—over- come all the sorrows of the world ? Is a great love not saving to the lover, because of the blessing which lives in it ? Is it not capable of shielding him from all pain, from all misfortune P George, be truthful I ask this in the name of your own love.' —Verson stood still. His face was dark like night. 'It is one of Nature's laws,' he said, 'that we must fall by our greatest, by our most holy sensations.'"

This is the keynote of the beautiful romance of Melting Snows, so excellently translated by Miss Margaret Symonds,'

as to be an English work of art. It is the highest compliment which can be paid to any one who does such translation to say that he or she has selected for interpretation what is a masterpiece in its own kind, and has put no obstacle to its enjoyment in the way of the new readers to whom it is thus introduced.

Bent Sorenson is a mathematical student at a German University, whose mind is as well regulated as his conduct ; he lives, works, and thinks without emotion ; he knows that he has before him the maintenance of his younger brothers and

sisters, that he is to be the exemplary Lutheran minister's son, He does not want anything more than his life gives him. He scarcely notices whether it is winter or summer. But, when winter is almost over, one day, in searching for an old book in his landlady's untidy attic, he suddenly feels the need of fresh air, opens a door above him, and, dazzled by the light, almost stumbles in his faintness from the ridge of the roof.

Suddenly he hears the voice of a young girl from her own neighbouring roof-top, with its garden, and, when he recovers from his dizziness, she tells him why she has called to him.

She thought he was going to throw himself over. She simply speaks of life, of the coming spring, and he hesitates :— "'Then you didn't know anything about the spring ?' she began again.—' No,' he answered slowly. 'I had no time to think about it. But now it is come, and I will believe in it just because you love it so.'—' Do,' she answered simply; 'and don't work too much. Get well.' " Giaeinta has stirred him. The snow is melting in the stm-I light. She has said :—" The only people who are really poor are those whose hearts are poor ; " and when he goes to take his work to an engineer, the same thing is said by the man, the head of his own happy family :—" You are much, too much, in earnest about your position." Bent half resents the kind counsel of enjoyment from the man, who moreover offers him, with words of approval, a new opening ; but all of a sudden he feels better and happier. He had never thought of praise as useful,—it, too, was a new emotion. "I believe your kindness by itself will help me." He goes to spend money on flowers,—they cost him dear ; they are forced growths,—they would have been refused, even when he makes his opportunity,

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but that he had been seen by Giacinta in giving secretly to an unknown girl. Poor Bent his second offering is a MS.,— "Inquiry into the Higher Hyperboloid, dedicated with grati- tude and deep esteem by Bent Sorenson, Studiosus, to one who saved his life." She does not laugh aloud ; but presently they discuss poetry, which he condemns as unpractical but easy work ; and yet he goes to his own room to write a poem. He fails, but some of Giacinta's words come back to him : "a happy heart never produced a great poem." But this is of no matter; kindness, flowers, poetry, sunshine, spring, they are after all of value,—the snow is melting fast. And now he is happy. He goes to see Giacinta and the aunt, who chaperons, without taking care of, the lonely girl ; Giacinta, too, is a student, a singer, who has her own way to make in the world. Her aunt speaks of her land of Italy, and by-and- by the two young people exchange confidences. Bent tells Giacinta in a passage of striking descriptive beauty, too long to quote, of the land from which he has come,—Jutland, with its storms, its marshes, its desolation ; and in the home-life nothing but monotony and one long tale of toil and struggle with hard work ; "behind his words, though he did not know it, there lay a fund of deep renunciation." Yet he discovers that he is richer than'the delicate, lonely girl ; she has youth, beauty, genius, and goodness, but he finds he has sympathy to give. That is worth giving.

When he returns, Von Versen, a poet, is in his rooms; come to apologise for having recited poetry, and so, perhaps, baying driven Sorenson from his regular evening's appearance at the Students' Club; genially speaking of the respect and love of its frequenters for the steady student, but then comically delighted to have found Bent's Horace, and within it an attempt at verse-making : "Bent, Bent, what a Tartuffe you are " he laughs. And as happens between the simple natures of this world, whether the simplicity springs from having seen much or little, there friendship arises. Versen expands, and somehow Bent responds to the man who knows and speaks of lova ; he instinctively now appeals to the poet, and draws him into one of those ebullitions of feeling in which such imaginative minds must prophesy, when Bent says :-

"'Perhaps it is a mere folly which I have tried to describe!— ' No, Bent,' Yemen cried, jumping up ; 'that is not folly; by God, it is not folly I know the feeling well. And what it means, I also know. It means a revolution, it means a storm, which will break through everything in your soul which is brittle. . . • . . Bent, be my friend. Give we your hand. Two can endure better than one alone. Your youth, with its troubles and its poverty, is falling together behind you : you cannot help it. God alone knows what will become of you ; but anyhow, it was His breath which brushed across your forehead. If the storm which is awaking in you be the storm of genius, or if it be that of some great passion, follow it without a struggle; let yourself go to it, and do not ask for any pledge. Possibly you will be happy, more probably unhappy. Do not inquire into it, but remember this, that sunshine and that lightning both come from God. You will become a man, different to other men ; you will stand alone, your heart filled with turmoils, tilled with thought and love. Then, Bent, then, do not shut yourself up, for, if you do, you will have suffered in vain.'"

He who spoke, though Bent did not find it out then, was rich in all that wonderful material comfort of life which de- ,

grades the being that too greedily lives for it, and yet, if the

nature is instinctively disregardful of luxury, and the mind is accustomed to position, may serve, as a rich soil serves con- 'genial and suitable plants, to produce the full, and even the noblest development of creative art. Bit by bit, in the circle round him, Bent is brought to see the imaginative but not imaginary pain and joy of life in its fullness and its limita- tions. Here is the Hofrath, who regretfully predicts that the delicate genius Giacinta must fail; he represents Experience, and his message is that the world is malicious ; there is the great tenor, who tells of the sadness of Success; behind :them is a crowd of those who have realised low and attain- able ideals, and who have done well to themselves. It is only by a touch here and there that all these things are depicted as the story of passion moves on to its climax. It is just by a hint that the doom of the Jew, with the fate of the innocent Jewish girl, is given ; it shows us by a flash what crimes can be done by man, but seems inserted in the story, only because such episodes are accountable for the gossip which soon unjustly rises round Bent, and which, whilst he cannot make out the reason, exposes him to the loss of the respect of his contemporaries, and to the severe but reserved reprimand of the Professor, who stands for the disillusionised teacher. Bo far as Bent knows, "there was nothing very bad in what

he had done ;" but, as the Professor said, "The higher you stand, the further you have to fall." That, too, was "vanity," for must not even the fact of having borne a character better than the average have its Nemesis ? And then Giacinta has to endure in her way the same envy and scorn. Yet, through the melting snows now cold and bitter, their love blossoms, and they snatch at its fruit too soon. The catastrophe of their lives arrives, and then the end comes, involving the poet, the singer, the student in the tragedy which is com- pleted, as such tragedies are, not in death, but—in a sen- tence for life : a life in which "the days go on" and mourn the lost love and the interrupted friendship, but rise to the quiet, sober fulfilment of the everyday duty. Was it better or worse that love and friendship and imagination had trans- figured life for a time? Would Bent Sorenson blot out from his career the exquisitely joyous and painful episode which separated the Jute's dreary boyhood from his dull middle-age? Who knows? But the poet's voice has been silenced in the flood, and as its after growth Sorenson becomes a singer.

Whilst the story is tragic, embodying the thought that there can be no awakening of the soul without cost, it is not morbid. Tragedy is ever severe ; but through tragedy is worked out all redemption. Fate is always stern; but for- titude knows her secrets and her gifts. It is not morbid to be conscious of suffering ; it is morbid to be dead in self-pity to the wider life which courage may still serve. It is not desirable to avoid, if possible, feeling ; what is needed is that we should not grow hardened by our fate. It is not wisdom to shut our eyes, so long as we may, to pain and sorrow; but it is folly not to train ourselves by degrees to the exercise of patience and the maintenance of personal dignity. It is not waste to give life at once or by degrees to the real call ; it is futile to let it roll into the Slough of Despond ; and in literature the average mind, which witnesses and admires the sacrifice of the hero is strengthened, whilst that which curiously contemplates suicide must be enervated. Melting Snows does not embody the "paradox of the saints :" Be strong and He shall comfort thine heart; but in spite of its limitations, it says to any higher nature that if any awakening implies suffering, suffering must bring development, and that this development is worth the suffering through which its work must be accomplished. For the suffering which accom- panies opposition to the laws of nature, there is provision in the nature of man to ignore it for the sake of the higher life thus created ; for the suffering which is attached to sin against the laws of God, the remedy can only be divine. It is not in the power of the author to insist much on the last point, but, as the poet told his friend when initiating him into the secrets of the life dawning on his half-awakened soul, "whether taught by Chamfort or John the Apostle :"—

"Love is the thread of Ariadne which is intended to lead us through a very dark labyrinth. Unluckily, it was woven too short for most of us. Love is companionship with God. It is the only human quality which cannot be small. There is nothing mean in love. Love is the beginning and the end ; the wit of man can never fathom it. Ask no wise man, ask no philosopher, what it is ; ask it of the woman you love,— ask it of God."

It is not easy to tell the story of a book in which no words are wasted, and in which each incident and character alike develop and illustrate the inner and outer sides of its intention, and yet a partial r6;savie of it may serve to show why Melting Snows is, as we have said, a really artistic work.