Politics play a very great part, and in the same sense, in _The Princess Casamassima_ (1886), but it is the peculiar magic of that strange book which is at once able and distraught, wild and meticulous, that in it all perversities are somehow transmuted into loveliness. It is one of the big jokes in literature that it was the writer who among all his contemporaries held the most sophisticated view of his art, who prided himself that on him there gleamed no drop of the dew of naivete, that brought back to fiction the last delicious breath of the time when even the best books ran on like this: "It happened that one dark and stormy night in March I, Sebastian Melmoth, was traversing the plain of La Mancha.... 'Have at you!' cried the guard.... 'Seat yourself,' said the stranger, signing to his Hindu attendant that the bodies should be removed, and commencing to cleanse the blood from his sword with a richly embroidered handkerchief, 'and I will tell you the story of my life.'" There is always something doing in _The Princess Casamassima_, and it is usually something great, and as a rule it is doing it quite on its own. As a portal to the disordered tale there stands one of the finest short stories in the world; how Miss Pynsent, the shabby little dressmaker who has brought up Hyacinth, the bastard child of a French work-girl now in Millbank for the murder of the peer who betrayed her, is suddenly bidden to bring the boy to his mother's prison deathbed, and how the poor woman drags him up to the brown, windowless walls, the vast blank gate, the looming corridors infused with sallow light, is such a study of the way the institutions devised by man in the interests of justice and order make a child's soul scream, that the reader will for ever after think a great deal less of Pip's adventures on the marshes in _Great Expectations_. Dickens could never have suffused his story with so exquisite and so relevant an emotional effect as the aching of poor Miss Pynsent's heart over this rough introduction of her cherished lamb to the horrible; nor could he have invented that wonderful moment when the child turns from the ravenous embrace of the wasted and disfigured stranger with, "I won't kiss her; Pinnie says she stole a watch!" at which the murderess screams, "_Ah! quelle infamie!_ I never stole anything!" and the wardress says with dignity: "I'm sure you needn't put more on her than she has by rights," to which the poor virgin, quite unable to understand the peculiar cachet attaching to a _crime passionel_, cries contritely, "Mercy, more! I thought it so much less!"