nt familiarity with this kind of
life, of knowledge not merely accumulated, but assimilated. Knowing as
we do that Mrs. Woods was not brought up in a circus, we infer that
she must have spent much labor in research: but, taken by itself, her
book permits no such inference. The truth is that in the case of a
genuine artist no line can be drawn between knowledge and imagination.
Probably--almost certainly--Mrs. Woods has to a remarkable degree that
gift which Mr. Henry James describes as "the faculty which when you
give it an inch takes an ell, and which for an artist is a much
greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place
in the social scale ... the power to guess the unseen from the seen,
to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the
pattern; the condition of feeling life in general so completely that
you are well on your way to knowing a particular corner of it." Be
this as it may, Mrs. Woods has written a novel which, for mastery of
an unfamiliar _milieu_, is almost fit to stand beside _Esther Waters_.
I say "almost": for, although Mrs. Woods's mastery is easier and less
conscious than Mr. Moore's, it neither goes so deep to the springs of
action nor bears so intimately on the conduct of the story. But of
this later.

If one thing more than another convinces me that Mrs. Woods has
thoroughly realized these queer characters of hers, it is that she
makes them so much like other people. Whatever our profession may be,
we are generally silent upon the instincts that led us to adopt
it--unless, indeed, we happen to be writers and make a living out of
self-analysis. So these strollers are silent upon the attractiveness
of their calling. But they crave as openly as any of us for
distinction, and they worship "respectability" as heartily and
outspokenly as any of the country-folk for whose amusement they tumble
and pull faces. It is no small merit in this book that it reveals how
much and yet how very little divides the performers in the ring from
the audience in the sixpenny seats. I wish I had space to quote a
particularly fine passage--you will find it on pp. 72-74--in which
Mrs. Woods describes the progress of these motley characters through
Midland lanes on a fresh spring morning; the shambling white horses
with their red collars, the painted vans, the cages "where bears paced
uneasily and strange birds thrust uncouth heads out into the
sunshine," the two elephants and the c