Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/918

796 enough to break. Indeed, Mr. Watson comes near to reversing Blackwood's process. The one sees trees as human beings, the other, so close are his nature analogies, sometimes sees men as trees walking, or more often as animals stalking. On the surface it is a common comparison. People often suggest their plant or animal prototype, but this human ethnologist goes farther, traces the animal in their natures, and is pleading for as consistent a following of animal law in human life as makes for calm and strength.

It is Matthew Arnold's old cry for self-dependence,

Susan has no prototype among animals. She is rather like a tree, alert to every change of season, bending to the gale as a tree must, and tossing on the wind's passion unafraid because her roots go deep. Her mother's last counsel comes to mean much to her. Later, her father gives her a man's version of the same idea. He has come airily back to live with his daughters and Aunt Dorothy in Swaystead, but he cannot keep from intriguing for the affections of the aunt and the housemaid indiscriminately. When he defends his conduct, Susan asks, rather indignantly:

"But don't women have their own lives, their own values? Haven't you the imagination to consider them?—Is that impossible?" And Paul replies, "How can I consider them when they do not consider themselves?"

All this leads Susan to fight hard against love when it comes to her. She succeeds at least in keeping her spiritual freedom, and for the rest is content with her lover. Tom Northover, who is at once hero, and for a time, agent of unhappiness to Susan, is distinctly an animal type. Mr. Watson refers to him as a "conscienceless animal"—with no suggestion of Puritan disgust for his ruthless intelligence. When Susan wonders how he can live so quietly and at peace with old mad Henry, she remembers "those accidents in nature when animals quite dissimilar in habit live together in the same hole." Noel Sarret, a vivid and disturbing pilgrim towards individual expression, watched Tom's swift and animal-like move-