Page:Watch and Ward (Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878).djvu/148

Rh Common life,—I don't say it 's a vision of bliss, but it 's better than that. Their stories are like the underside of a carpet,—nothing but the stringy grain of the tissue,—a muddle of figures without shape and flowers without color. When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the dénouement. Your clergyman here with his Romish sweetheart must be a very poor creature. Why did n't he marry her first and convert her afterwards? Is n't a clergyman after all, before all, a man? I mean to write a novel about a priest, who falls in love with a pretty Mahometan and swears by Allah to win her."

"O Hubert!" cried Nora, "would you like a clergyman to love a pretty Mahometan better than the truth?"

"The truth? A pretty Mahometan may be the truth. If you can get it in the concrete, after shivering all your days in the cold abstract, it 's worth a bit of a compromise. Nora, Nora!" he went on, stretching himself back on the sofa and flinging one arm over his head, "I stand up for passion! If a thing can take the shape of passion, that 's a fact in its favor. The greater passion is the better cause. If my love wrestles with my faith, as the angel with Jacob, and if my love stands uppermost, I will admit it 's a fair game. Faith is faith, under a hundred forms! Upon my word, I should like to prove it. What a fraction of my personality is this clerical title! How little it expresses; how little it covers! On Sundays, in the pulpit, I stand up and talk to five hundred people. Does each of them, think you, appropriate his five hundredth share of my discourse? I can