This testifies to the flexibility of Darien's talent, since nothing can be more different to the impetuous and turgid violence of _Biribi_ than the restrained and delicate irony of _Bas les Coeurs_: the one is a battle-piece of Vereschagin, crowded with begrimed and panting figures, in which the dumb canvas seems to shriek with war and smoke with blood; the other is a cabinet picture of Meissonier's, finished, polished, small in measurement, illimitable in suggestion, fine as the point of a needle, cruel as the fork of a snake's tongue. For, undoubtedly, Darien is cruel; but he is cruel from the impotent rage which is in him, the powerless sorrow and scorn which his country, his generation, his fellow mortals, his vision of things as they are, awaken in his memory and in his desires. The apathy and sheepishness of the general multitude fill him with wrath; he longs to pull down on the world its temple, like Samson, regardless of the fall of the column and the roof on himself. No one who loves received doctrines, crystallised commonplaces, undisputed formulæ, should open these books. Such persons will only see in them blasphemies against their honoured gods; for this author is not suited to the smug self-complacency of Philistinism, 'sanding its sugar and praising its Lord.' To represent war as it is done in the terrible pages of _La Débâcle_, or in the heartrending sketch of the _Attaque du Moulin_, is not difficult to the novelist who has power and knowledge. To represent the effects of war on entirely uninteresting and commonplace persons, and yet keep the attention of the reader riveted to what is passing in one ordinary household during a frightful national calamity, is a far more difficult feat; especially when all the sympathies of the reader which would be easily roused by noble sentiments in the sufferers are voluntarily alienated, and the only motives and feelings depicted are sordid, egotistic, and miserable, except in the young narrator, whose childish intelligence is so slowly awakened to the baseness of those around him, but whose naturally honest and patriotic little soul burns and thrills with shame when once it becomes conscious of the meanness and cowardice of his family and of his neighbours. The highest literary faculty seems to me to show itself in the completeness with which the childlikeness of the young observer is retained, the vague apprehension, the slowly awakening comprehension, the gradually dawning horror with which the events around him impress themselves on a mind remaining instinctively loyal and just in the midst of corrupt and unworthy examples. Take this as an example of its style:-- 'Shouts are heard afar off in the woods. '"Ah, my poor child!" says my aunt, weeping, "what a hideous thing is war!" 'She looks very feeble, very worn, my poor great-aunt Moreau. The sight of her thin face, her skeleton-like hands, moves me painfully. She sees this.