Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/57

 Rh as gloomy as death and judgment! The style is one of utter, nay, bald, simplicity. The situations are merely indicated; and the characters are to be divined, as are those of the living, rather from a few words in close connection with accompanying facts, than from eloquent utterances, sharp invectives, or bitter complaints. There are no highly-wrought amplifications of imaginative passions to be found in its condensed pages, but every word is in itself a drop of gall, reflecting from its sphered surface a world of grief,—of voiceless agony!

The characters are not fleshed into life; they pass before us like shadows thrown from a magic lantern, showing only their profiles, and but rarely their entire forms. Flitting rapidly o'er our field of vision, they leave us but a few lines; but so true are the lines to nature, so deeply significant, that we are at once able to produce from the shifting and evanescent shadows a complete and rounded image. Thus we are enabled to form a vivid conception of all who figure in these pages; we know the history of their i)ast, we divine the part they will play in the future. We know the friends; the stilted godfather with his stereotyped speeches; the priest, in whom we recognize an admirable sketch, the original of which could only be found in a decomposed and dying society.

Our author also stigmatizes the medical art of our day as a science of death and moral torture. While the anguished father tries to penetrate the decrees of Providence, and in his agony demands from God how the innocent and helpless infant can have deserved a punishment so dreadful as the loss of sight, the doctor admires the strength of the nerves and muscles of the blue eyes of the fair child, at the same time pedantically announcing to his father that he is struck with total and hopeless blindness! Immediately after the annunciation of this fearful sentence, he turns to the distressed parent to ask him if he would like to know the name of this malady,—that in Greek it is called .

Through the whole of this melancholy scene, only one human being manifests any deep moral feeling—a woman: a servant! Falling upon her knees, she prays the Holy Virgin to take her eyes, and place them in the sightless