Nor does the author seem to fall short of the opportunity offered her for the vivid and moving portrayal of the great passions involved in so high an action. For many it will constitute the prime marvel of an extraordinary book that its author, a young girl of fifteen or sixteen, who knew nothing of Italy, or of the Italian character, save, through books, could have conceived and written it. But if we grant the extraordinary precocity of talent implied in the mere writing of such a book as _The Viper of Milan_, it is, perhaps, less remarkable than it at first appears that Miss Bowen should have been so successful in grasping the purely Italian side of her subject, in rendering the Italian psychology. For is not youth the Italian age of life? Is there not something in the ardent dreams and in the swift, uncontrollable impulses of young natures, that finds _itself_ in the spirit of that race which though the eldest is still the youngest race of Europe? The Italian soul, complex as it may appear upon the surface, is in essence simple. It is the soul of desire, of desire for the dream realized. Such is the desire even of a Visconti, and the soul of such a man makes him as simple to seize upon as the ogre of a fairy tale.
A fairy tale!--historical novels are all fairy tales, or approximate to fairy tales, for the same reason, perhaps, that all the fairies, Puck, Oberon and the rest of them, were once people in history. Under all the complexity and confusion of man's mental life there lies the invincible demand for the simple and the absolute in his view of the past as of the universe. The scholar and the scientific historian seek to build up stone by stone, from the dust-heap of the ages, the intricate web of the past; but the historical novelist, closer to the imagination of the race, seeks rather to reproduce the past in its broad outlines, in its ideal aspects of sharply defined and sharply opposing forces.
We hear much to-day of the death of the historical novel as a form of art. And this is because at its best to-day it has seemed a clever reconstruction of the past, a _pastiche_, as the French call it, a work of erudition, rather than an appropriation of the past for the purpose of effecting a romantic release from the uncompromising and prosaic conditions of the present. It is no wonder that the old romantic form of Scott and Dumas, being reduced to so lifeless a formula, should occasionally appear moribund. But it should be remembered that what proceeds from the mind, and is part of it, can always be renewed from the mind, and that forms in art are constantly being revitalized by some fresh creative impulse. And so often as there shall appear a writer like Miss Bowen capable of properly appraising the past, not as a shop stuffed with strange articles of attire and antiquities, but as a splendid stage set for the performance of a moving human drama, just so often will the historical novel renew its attraction over the minds of all men in new creations.