the sunshine
streamed in; Elly was standing in it, and seemed gilt with a golden
background. She ought to have held a palm in her hand, poor little martyr!"
There is sweet wisdom in this book, wisdom that is eternal, being simple;
and near may not come the ugliness of positivism, nor the horror of
pessimism, nor the profound greyness of Hegelism, but merely the genial
love and reverence of a beautiful-minded woman.

Such charms as these necessitate certain defects, I should say limitations.
Vital creation of character is not possible to Miss Thackeray, but I do not
rail against beautiful water-colour indications of balconies, vases,
gardens, fields, and harvesters because they have not the fervid glow and
passionate force of Titian's Ariadne; Miss Thackeray cannot give us a
Maggie Tulliver, and all the many profound modulations of that
Beethoven-like countryside: the pine wood and the cripple; this aunt's
linen presses, and that one's economies; the boy going forth to conquer the
world, the girl remaining at home to conquer herself; the mighty river
holding the fate of all, playing and dallying with it for a while, and
bearing it on at last to final and magnificent extinction. That sense of
the inevitable which had the Greek dramatists wholly, which had George
Eliot sufficiently, that rhythmical progression of events, rhythm and
inevitableness (two words for one and the same thing) is not there. Elly's
golden head, the back-ground of austere French Protestants, is sketched
with a flowing water-colour brush, I do not know if it is true, but true or
false in reality, it is true in art. But the jarring dissonance of her
marriage is inadmissible; it cannot be led up to by chords no matter how
ingenious, the passage, the attempts from one key to the other, is
impossible; the true end is the ruin, by death or lingering life, of Elly
and the remorse of the mother.

One of the few writers of fiction who seems to me to possess an ear for the
music of events is Miss Margaret Veley. Her first novel, "For Percival,"
although diffuse, although it occasionally flowed into by-channels and
lingered in stagnating pools, was informed and held together, even at ends
the most twisted and broken, by that sense of rhythmic progression which is
so dear to me, and which was afterwards so splendidly developed in
"Damocles." Pale, painted with grey and opaline tints of morning passes the
grand figure of Rachel Conway, a victim chosen for her be