THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
casion, when at the
Pension
where we were staying, Otto was on the
verandah, carrying on a very intensive battle with a hornet, Chris–
topher watched the scene through a window, murmuring: "Is it true
that a hornet's sting can kill? Oh God, sting him, sting him!"
And yet there was a side of all this which made Christopher suf–
fer enormously, to a degree which ravaged him. Sometimes I think
that the strongest proof of moral imagination is a person's capacity
to suffer for another person who may seem-to
all
outside observers–
quite worthless. For is it not in the lives of the weak and the abject
that we see the struggle of those who are tempted and lost which we
have read of in all the stories which held our minds when we were
young?
(To be continued in the next issue)
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