auty, and crowned
with flowers of sacrifice. She has not forgotten the face of the maniac,
and it comes back to her in its awful lines and lights when she finds
herself rich and loved by the man whom she loves. The catastrophe is a
double one. Now she knows she is accursed, and that her duty is to trample
out her love. Unborn generations cry to her. The wrath and the lamentation
of the chorus of the Greek singer, the intoning voices of the next-of-kin,
the pathetic responses of voices far in the depths of ante-natal night,
these the modern novelist, playing on an inferior instrument, may suggest,
but cannot give: but here the suggestion is so perfect that we cease to
yearn for the real music, as, reading from a score, we are satisfied with
the flute and bassoons that play so faultlessly in soundless dots.

There is neither hesitation nor doubt. Rachel Conway puts her dreams away,
she will henceforth walk in a sad and shady path; her interests are centred
in the child of the man she loves, and as she looks for a last time on the
cloud of trees, glorious and waving green in the sunset that encircles her
home, her sorrow swells once again to passion, and, we know, for the last
time.

The mechanical construction of M. Scribe I had learnt from M. Duval; the
naturalistic school had taught me to scorn tricks, and to rely on the
action of the sentiments rather than on extraneous aid for the bringing
about of a _denouement_; and I thought of all this as I read
"Disenchantment" by Miss Mabel Robinson, and it occurred to me that my
knowledge would prove valuable when my turn came to write a novel, for the
_mise en place_, the setting forth of this story, seemed to me so
loose, that much of its strength had dribbled away before it had rightly
begun. But the figure of the Irish politician I accept without reserve. It
seems to me grand and mighty in its sorrowfulness. The tall, dark-eyed,
beautiful Celt, attainted in blood and brain by generations of famine and
drink, alternating with the fervid sensuousness of the girl, her Saxon
sense of right alternating with the Celt's hereditary sense of revenge, his
dreamy patriotism, his facile platitudes, his acceptance of literature as a
sort of bread basket, his knowledge that he is not great nor strong, and
can do nothing in the world but love his country; and as he passes his
thirtieth year the waxing strong of the disease, nervous disease complex
and torturous; to him drink is at once li