understood what a power, what a tragic motive force in human life, inevitable illusion or self-deception is. It is the source to which not only half of human happiness, but a considerable proportion of human misery may be traced. But Mérimée approaches nearer than this to tragedy proper, where the fateful element sinks deep into the character, mingling with it as a poison mingles with the blood. Think of _Carmen_. From the day of José's first meeting with Carmen, the gipsy girl, the course of his life is changed; and he, the honest, good-hearted man, becomes of inevitable necessity, for her sake, a robber and a murderer. Nay, the author, whose aim as a young Romanticist was to hold as far aloof as possible from the poets who wrote tragedy in the ancient Greek style, approaches, in _Colomba_, with his modern Corsican heroine, nearer to Greek tragedy than any of his fellow-countrymen who hymned the fate of one or other of "Agamemnon's imperishable race." Not without reason has Colomba been compared to Elektra. Like Elektra, she broods, to the exclusion of every other thought, on the unavenged death of her father; like Elektra, she incites her brother to take a bloody revenge; and she is even less of the stereotyped tragedy heroine than Sophocles' young girl, for, clad though she is in the steel panoply of appalling prejudices, she bears herself simply and lovably. She is at once bloodthirsty and childlike, hard-hearted and girlish; a fierce grace is her characteristic trait. It is easy for us now to see how much more nearly akin this fresh, vigorous daughter of a little southern island race is to the old Greek female characters than are all those princesses who walked the French stage in buskins, and borrowed the names of Elektra, Antigone, or Iphigenia. But she is perhaps still more nearly related to the heathen daughters of a far-away northern isle, the women of the Icelandic sagas, who brood with such passionate obstinacy over their family feuds, and force the unwilling men to take blood for blood.