, the space given by Mrs. Sharp to modern and
living poetesses is somewhat disproportionate, and I am sure that those
on whose brows the laurels are still green would not grudge a little room
to those the green of whose laurels is withered and the music of whose
lyres is mute.

* * * * *

One of the most powerful and pathetic novels that has recently appeared
is A Village Tragedy by Margaret L. Woods. To find any parallel to this
lurid little story, one must go to Dostoieffski or to Guy de Maupassant.
Not that Mrs. Woods can be said to have taken either of these two great
masters of fiction as her model, but there is something in her work that
recalls their method; she has not a little of their fierce intensity,
their terrible concentration, their passionless yet poignant objectivity;
like them, she seems to allow life to suggest its own mode of
presentation; and, like them, she recognises that a frank acceptance of
the facts of life is the true basis of all modern imitative art. The
scene of Mrs. Woods's story lies in one of the villages near Oxford; the
characters are very few in number, and the plot is extremely simple. It
is a romance of modern Arcadia--a tale of the love of a farm-labourer for
a girl who, though slightly above him in social station and education, is
yet herself also a servant on a farm. True Arcadians they are, both of
them, and their ignorance and isolation serve only to intensify the
tragedy that gives the story its title. It is the fashion nowadays to
label literature, so, no doubt, Mrs. Woods's novel will be spoken of as
'realistic.' Its realism, however, is the realism of the artist, not of
the reporter; its tact of treatment, subtlety of perception, and fine
distinction of style, make it rather a poem than a proces-verbal; and
though it lays bare to us the mere misery of life, it suggests something
of life's mystery also. Very delicate, too, is the handling of external
Nature. There are no formal guide-book descriptions of scenery, nor
anything of what Byron petulantly called 'twaddling about trees,' but we
seem to breathe the atmosphere of the country, to catch the exquisite
scent of the beanfields, so familiar to all who have ever wandered
through the Oxfordshire lanes in June; to hear the birds singing in the
thicket, and the sheep-bells tinkling from the hill. Characterisation,
that enemy of literary form, is such an essential part of the method of
the modern writer of fiction,