The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-01-07
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AOlA ISDE I0l In literature the fantastic has a real and important place. Some of the mas ter pieces in all languages are purely fan tastic Even in comparatively unskilled hands, the fantastic usually succeeds in making an appeal to the readers because It satisfies-the human desire for some thing that will divert the mind from the everyday concerns of life. But the fan- tastic rarely appeals for any reason other than because 1t is fantastic. we do not, for instance, imagine that there ever were such beings as those who people ! Poes wonderful fantasies. We do not expect ever to meet such people. It is the same with Coleridge's creations, with the exception of ''rhe Ancient Mariner" However, it may thrill us, a fantastic story rarely succeeds in making us deem it part of our own world. 1t remains ghostly and the actors in it remain ghosts.
 When Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations he conceived a prodigious- " fantastic figure. a ghost. He wrested that ghost from the fantasies of dream, and he set it, alive and terribly real, into the living world That living ghost is Miss Hayisham.
 To all who read the story, she remains forever spectral, Frightening shape; but she remains real. She is a ghost. but not the ghost of legends, walking the earth in grave clothes. She is ghost that we all know. We have all seen such ghosts move among us in flesh and blood, with hearts and minds long dead and buried.
 Miss Havisham is a remarkable ex- ample of Dickens almost unique ability for combining the very extremes of TO- nance and realism. He never troubled himself about whether he was a roman 1cist or a realist. He saw the romance in in romance. He saw, and showed, that every human being has rocance in him and that every romance has a human being in it.
 Neither a modern realst or modern romanticst could have made anything out of Miss Havisham. She could be created only by man who was both. Only Dickens could have made her what he did-a spectre that remains intensely real in her intensely human breeding over old wrongs, in her blind hatred of the world, in her craving for revenge, and in her miserable agony of repentance when she sees that revenge fulfilled. Rarely has any writer painted better the great truth that revenge revenges itself on no one so surely as on the one who wreaks that revenge. And his magnificent sanity and directness are shown nowhere more clear ly than in this, his most fantastic story; for it strikes one of the most straight and true and direct blows ever struck at the colossal folly of hugging dead wrongs and griefs and setting them up to blast the present and the future. instead of let ting them become a softening memory of sorrows past and gone.
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 "HE name of the great house was
 Satis House. It had been so nam J ed by it's proud and happy builder
 I-i- 1 sires that whoever owned and dwelled in it could wish for nothing more.
 However well or i'll he may have been satisfied after he had finished it, he had to satisfy Death when Death appointed the time. Others of his race succeeded as heirs to house and tomb Perhaps more than one of them discovered that the word "Satis' was a little ironical graven over the portals of the house and might much more appropriately have been carved over the portals of the family tomb. Still, Satis House presented laughing front to the world. rich with gardens by day and bright with lights by night, and, like the people who dwelled in it, made bravo show of it's happiness and kept it's troubles, if it had any, to itself.
 Not till 1t came into the hands of the asst of the race did Satis House become bn open irony; not till Miss Havishan, ho spoiled beauty. met her tragedy, was Satis House transformed from a house to grave, like creature of Rastern enchantment, suddenly petri- jed
 When she succeeded to the family bossessoins, 1t seemed that happiness never could turn it's back on her or he house She was young, beautiful md rich. From infancy she had not known what it is to have d desire hnfulhlled. There was none near her who did not bend to her slightest wish None ever dared to hint that any wish possibly might be mere caprice None yer taught her that haughtiness and mpatience of restraint were sails tilat Challenged disaster.
 That those who were truthful and sim ere should turn away from her. and hat their place should be taken by flat erers and fawners in ever augmenting numbers, was of course, remorselessly ogical That every one of the self seek rs should spoil her as the shortest way get whatever they wanted from her, vas, of course, inevitable. The mournful part of it was that they spoiled and dis orted woman whose heart had rare towers for great and true devotion and onstancy; and in spelling her nature. hey robbed that heart of any hope of guidance.
 The time came when it needed that uidance; and she was blind.
 Of all the many who had wooed her he honest men whose love she had ossed aside like any other proffered gift no value, and the mercenary ones ,hom she had escaped by being coldly ldifferent-there probably had not been ne so unworthy in every degree as the ian who won her. He was a handsome nan She did not perceive that he was little too handsome He was polished lan of the world. She did not see that e was too polished and too much of the rorld Tn station and habit and environ bent he was what is known technically a gentleman. She did not perceive that e was a little too much of that kind of entleman. His name was Compeyson Even at