But in 'Waverley' Scott had not yet begun to use the dramatic method so freely as to sacrifice the very different qualities imported into the novel by Fielding, whose method was epic rather than dramatic. I think Mr. Watts-Dunton has himself somewhere commented upon this, and said that Scott carried the dramatic method quite as far as it could go without making the story suffer from that kind of stageyness and artificial brightness which is fatal to the novel. Scott's disciple, Dumas, a more brilliant writer of dialogue than Scott himself, but not so true a one, carried the dramatic method too far and opened the way to mimics, who carried it further still. In 'Aylwin,' the blending of the two methods, the epic and the dramatic, is so skilfully done as to draw all the advantages that can be drawn from both; and this skill must be an enormous aid to the imaginative vision-an aid which Charlotte and Emily Bronte had to dispense with: but it is in the arrangement of the material on self-conscious constructive principles that I am chiefly thinking when I compare the imaginative vision in 'Aylwin' with that in 'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights.' On the whole, no one seems to have studied 'Aylwin'

from all points of view with so much insight as Madame Galimberti, unless it be M. Jacottet in 'La Semaine Litteraire.' Mr. Watts-Dunton in one of his essays has himself remarked that nine-tenths of the interest of any dramatic situation are lost if before approaching it the reader has not been made to feel an interest in the characters, as Fielding makes us feel an interest in Tom and Sophia long before they utter a word-indeed, long before they are introduced at all. This is true, no doubt, and the contemporary method of beginning a story like the opening of a play with long dialogues between characters that are strangers to the reader, is one among the many signs that, so far as securing illusion goes, there is a real retrogression in fictive art. A play, of course, must open in this way, but in an acted play the characters come bodily before the audience as real flesh and blood. They come surrounded by real accessories. They win our sympathy or else our dislike as soon as we see them and hear them speak. The dramatic scenes between Jane Eyre and Rochester would miss half their effect were it not for the picture of Jane as a child. In 'Aylwin,' by the time that there is any introduction of dramatic dialogue the atmosphere of the story has enveloped us: we have become so deeply in love with the two children that the most commonplace words from their lips would have seemed charged with beauty.

This kind of perfection of the novelist's art, in these days when stories are written to pa.s.s through magazines and newspapers, seemed impossible till 'Aylwin' appeared. It is curious to speculate as to what would have been the success of the opening chapters of 'Aylwin' if an instalment of the story had first made its appearance in a magazine.

One of the most remarkable features of 'Aylwin' is that in spite of the strength and originality of the mere story and in spite of the fact that the book is fundamentally the expression of a creed, the character painting does not in the least suffer from these facts. Striking and new as the story is, there is nothing mechanical about the structure. The characters are not, to use a well known phrase of the author's, 'plot-ridden' in the least degree, as are the characters of the great masters of the plot-novel, Lytton, Charles Reade, and Wilkie Collins, to mention only those who are no longer with us. Perhaps in order to show what I mean I ought to go a little into detail here. In 'Man and Wife,'

for instance, Collins, with his eye only upon his plot, makes the heroine, a lady whose delicacy of mind and n.o.bility of character are continually dwelt upon, not only by the author but by a sagacious man of the world like Sir Peter, who afterwards marries her, succ.u.mb to the animal advances of a brute like Geoffrey. Many instances of the same sacrifice of everything to plot occur in most of Collins's other stories, and as to the 'long arm of coincidence' he not only avails himself of that arm whenever it is convenient to do so, but he positively revels in his slavery to it. In 'Armadale,' for instance, besides scores of monstrous improbabilities, such as the ship 'La Grace de Dieu' coming to Scotland expressly that Allan Armadale should board her and have a dream upon her, and such as Midwinter's being by accident brought into touch with Allan in a remote village in Devonshire when he was upon the eve of death, we find coincidences which are not of the smallest use, introduced simply because the author loves coincidences-such as that of making a family connection of Armadale's rescue Miss Gwilt from drowning and get drowned himself, and thus bring about the devolution of the property upon Allan Armadale-an entirely superfluous coincidence, for the working power of this incident could have been secured in countless other ways. 'No Name' bristles with coincidences, such as that most impudent one where the heroine is at the point of death by dest.i.tution, and the one man who loves her and who had just returned to England pa.s.ses down the obscure and squalid street he had never seen before at the very moment when she is sinking. It is the same with Bulwer Lytton's novels. In 'Night and Morning,' for instance, people are tossed against each other in London, the country, or Paris at every moment whensoever the story demands it.

As to Gawtry, one of the few really original villains in modern fiction, as soon as the story opens we expect him to turn up every moment like a jack in-the-box; we expect him to meet the hero in the most unlikely places, and to meet every other character in the same way. Let his presence be required, and we know that he will certainly turn up to put things right. But in 'Aylwin,' which has been well called by a French critic, 'a novel without a villain,' where sinister circ.u.mstance takes the place of the villain, there is not a single improbable coincidence; everything flows from a few simple causes, such as the effect upon an English patrician of love baffled by all kinds of fantastic antagonisms, the influence of the doctrines of the dead father upon the minds of several individuals, and the influence of the impact of the characters upon each other. Another thing to note is that in spite of the strange, new scenes in which the characters move, they all display that 'softness of touch' upon which the author has himself written so eloquently in one of his articles in the 'Athenaeum.' I must find room to quote his words on this interesting subject:-

"The secret of the character-drawing of the great masters seems to be this: while moulding the character from broad general elements, from universal types of humanity, they are able to delude the reader's imagination into mistaking the picture for real portraiture, and this they achieve by making the portrait seem to be drawn from particular and peculiar traits instead of from generalities, and especially by hiding away all purposes-aesthetic, ethic, or political.

One great virtue of the great masters is their winsome softness of touch in character drawing. We are not fond of comparing literary work with pictorial art, but between the work of the novelist and the work of the portrait painter there does seem a true a.n.a.logy as regards the hardness and softness of touch in the drawing of characters. In landscape painting that hardness which the general public love is a fault; but in portrait painting so important is it to avoid hardness that unless the picture seems to have been blown upon the canvas, as in the best work of Gainsborough, rather than to have been laid upon it by the brush, the painter has not achieved a perfect success. In the imaginative literature of England the two great masters of this softness of touch in portraiture are Addison and Sterne. Three or four hardly-drawn lines in Sir Roger or the two Shandys, or Corporal Trim, would have ruined the portraits so completely that they would never have come down to us. Close upon Addison comes Scott, in whose vast gallery almost every portrait is painted with a Gainsborough softness. Scarcely one is limned with those hard lines which are too often apt to mar the glorious work of d.i.c.kens. After Scott comes Thackeray or Fielding, unless it be Mrs.

Gaskell. We are not in this article dealing with, or even alluding to, contemporary writers, or we might easily say what novelists follow Mrs. Gaskell."

Read in the light of these remarks the characters in 'Aylwin' become still more interesting to the critic. Observe how soft is the touch of the writer compared with that of a novelist of real though eccentric genius, Charles Reade. Now and again in Reade's portraits we get softness, as in the painting of the delightful Mrs. Dodd and her daughter, but it is very rare. The contrast between him and Mr.

Watts-Dunton in this regard is most conspicuously seen in their treatment of members of what are called the upper cla.s.ses. No doubt Reade does occasionally catch (what Charles d.i.c.kens never catches) that unconscious accent of high breeding which Thackeray, with all his yearning to catch it, scarcely ever could catch, save perhaps, in such a character as Lord Kew, but which Disraeli catches perfectly in St. Aldegonde.

On the appearance of 'Aylwin' it was amusing to see how puzzled many of the critics were when they came to talk about the various cla.s.ses in which the various figures moved. How could a man give pictures of gypsies in their tents, East Enders in their slums, Bohemian painters in their studios, aristocrats in their country houses, and all of them with equal vividness? But vividness is not always truth. Some wondered whether the gypsies were true, when 'up and spake' the famous Tarno Rye himself, Groome, the greatest authority on gypsies in the world, and said they were true to the life. Following him, 'up and spake' Gypsy Smith, and proclaimed them to be 'the only pictures of the gypsies that were true.' Some wondered whether the painters and Bohemians were rightly painted, when 'up and spake' Mr. Hake-more intimately acquainted with them than any living man left save W. M. Rossetti and Mr. Sharp-and said the pictures were as true as photographs. But before I pa.s.s on I must devote a few parenthetical words to the most curious thing connected with this matter. Not even the most captious critic, as far as I remember, ventured to challenge the manners of the patricians who play such an important part in the story. The Aylwin family, as Madame Galimberti has hinted, belonged to the only patriciate which either Landor or Disraeli recognized: the old landed unt.i.tled gentry. The best delineator of this cla.s.s is, of course, Whyte Melville. But those who have read Mr.

Watts-Dunton's remarks upon Byron in Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English Literature' will understand how thoroughly he too has studied this most interesting cla.s.s. The hero himself, in spite of all his eccentricity and in spite of all his Bohemianism, is a patrician-a patrician to the very marrow. 'There is not throughout Aylwin's narrative-a narrative running to something under 200,000 words-a single wrong note.' This opinion I heard expressed by a very eminent writer, who from his own birth and environment can speak with authority. The way in which Henry Aylwin as a child is made to feel that his hob-a-n.o.bbing on equal terms with the ragam.u.f.fin of the sands cannot really degrade an English gentleman; the way in which Henry Aylwin, the hobbledehoy, is made to feel that he cannot be lowered by living with gypsies, or by marrying the daughter of 'the drunken organist who violated my father's tomb'; the way in which he says that 'if society rejects him and his wife, he shall reject society';-all this shows a mastery over 'softness of touch' in depicting this kind of character such as not even Whyte Melville has equalled. Henry Aylwin's mother, to whom the word trade and plebeianism were synonymous terms, is the very type of the grande dame, untouched by the vulgarities of the smart set of her time (for there were vulgar smart sets then as there were vulgar smart sets in the time of Beau Brummell, and as there are vulgar smart sets now). Then there is that wonderful aunt, of whom we see so little but whose influence is so great and so mischievous. What a type is she of the meaner and more withered branch of a patrician tree! But the picture of Lord Sleaford is by far the most vivid portrait of a n.o.bleman that has appeared in any novel since 'Lothair.' Thackeray never 'knocked off' a n.o.bleman so airily and so unconsciously as this delightful lordling, whose portrait Mr.

Watts-Dunton has 'blown' upon his canvas in the true Gainsborough way. I wish I could have got permission to give more than a bird's-eye glance at Mr. Watts-Dunton's wide experience of all kinds of life, but I can only touch upon what the reading public is already familiar with. At one period of his life-the period during which he and Whistler were brought together-the period when 'Piccadilly,' upon which they were both engaged, was having its brief run, Mr. Watts-Dunton mixed very largely with what was then, as now, humourously called 'Society.' It has been said that 'for a few years not even "d.i.c.ky Doyle" or Jimmy Whistler went about quite so much as Theodore Watts.' I have seen Whistler's presentation copy of the first edition of 'The Gentle Art of Making Enemies' with this inscription:-'To Theodore Watts, the Worldling.' Below this polite flash of persiflage the famous b.u.t.terfly flaunts its elusive wings. But this was only Whistler's fun. Mr. Watts-Dunton was never, we may be sure, a worldling. Still one wonders that the most romantic of poets ever fell so low as to go into 'Society' with a big S. Perhaps it was because, having studied life among the gypsies, life among the artists, life among the literary men of the old Bohemia, life among the professional and scientific cla.s.ses, he thought he would study the b.u.t.terflies too.

However, he seems soon to have got satiated, for he suddenly dropped out of the smart Paradise. I mention this episode because it alone, apart from the power of his dramatic imagination, is sufficient to show why in Henry Aylwin he has so successfully painted for us the finest picture that has ever been painted of a true English gentleman tossed about in scenes and among people of all sorts and retaining the pristine bloom of England's patriciate through it all.

In my essay upon Mr. Watts-Dunton in Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English Literature,' I made this remark:-"Notwithstanding the vogue of 'Aylwin,'

there is no doubt that it is on his poems, such as 'The Coming of Love,'

'Christmas at the Mermaid,' 'Prophetic Pictures at Venice,' 'John the Pilgrim,' 'The Omnipotence of Love,' 'The Three Fausts,' 'What the Silent Voices Said,' 'Apollo in Paris,' 'The Wood-haunters' Dream,' 'The Octopus of the Golden Isles,' 'The Last Walk with Jowett from Boar's Hill,' and 'Omar Khayyam,' that Mr. Watts-Dunton's future position will mainly rest."

I did not say this rashly. But in order to justify my opinion I must quote somewhat copiously from Mr. Watts-Dunton's remarks upon absolute and relative vision, in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica.' It has been well said that 'in judging of the seeing power of any work of imagination, either in prose or in verse, it is now necessary always to try the work by the critical canons upon absolute and relative vision laid down in this treatise.' If we turn to it, we shall find that absolute vision is defined to be that vision which in its highest dramatic exercise is unconditioned by the personal temperament of the writer, while relative vision is defined to be that vision which is more or less conditioned by the personal temperament of the writer. And then follows a long discussion of various great imaginative works in which the two kinds of vision are seen:-

"For the achievement of most imaginative work relative vision will suffice. If we consider the matter thoroughly, in many forms-which at first sight might seem to require absolute vision-we shall find nothing but relative vision at work. Between relative and absolute vision the difference is this, that the former only enables the imaginative writer even in its very highest exercise, to make his own individuality, or else humanity as represented by his own individuality, live in the imagined situation; the latter enables him in its highest exercise to make special individual characters other than the poet's own live in the imagined situation. In the very highest reaches of imaginative writing art seems to become art no longer-it seems to become the very voice of Nature herself. The cry of Priam when he puts to his lips the hand that slew his son, is not merely the cry of a bereaved and aged parent; it is the cry of the individual king of Troy, and expresses above everything else that most nave, pathetic, and winsome character. Put the cry into the mouth of the irascible and pa.s.sionate Lear, and it would be entirely out of keeping. While the poet of relative vision, even in its very highest exercise, can only, when depicting the external world, deal with the general, the poet of absolute vision can compete with Nature herself and deal with both general and particular."

Now, the difference between 'The Coming of Love' and 'Aylwin' is this, that in 'Aylwin' the impulse is, or seems to be, lyrical, and therefore too egoistic for absolute vision to be achieved. Of course, if we are to take Henry Aylwin in the novel to be an entirely dramatic character, then that character is so full of vitality that it is one of the most remarkable instances of purely dramatic imagination that we have had in modern times. For there is nothing that he says or does that is not inevitable from the nature of the character placed in the dramatic situation. Those who are as familiar as I am with Mr. Watts-Dunton's prose writings outside 'Aylwin' find it extremely difficult to identify the brilliant critic of the 'Athenaeum,' full of ripe wisdom and sagacity, with the impa.s.sioned boy of the story. Indeed, I should never have dreamed of identifying the character with the author any more than I should have thought of identifying Philip Aylwin with the author had it not been for the fact that Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his preface to one of the constantly renewed editions of his book, seems to suggest that identification himself. I have already quoted the striking pa.s.sage in the introduction to the later editions of the book in which this identification seems to be suggested. But, matters being as they are with regard to the identification of the hero of the prose story with the author, it is to 'The Coming of Love' that we must for the most part turn for proof that the writer is possessed of absolute vision. Percy Aylwin and Rhona are there presented in the purely dramatic way, and they give utterance to their emotions, not only untrammelled by the lyricism of the dramatist, but untrammelled also, as I have before remarked, by the exigencies of a conscious dramatic structure. In no poetry of our time can there be seen more of that absolute vision so lucidly discoursed upon in the foregoing extract. From her first love-letter Rhona leaps into life, and she seems to be more elaborately painted not only than any woman in recent poetry, but any woman in recent literature. Percy Aylwin lives also with almost equal vitality. I need not give examples of this here, for later I shall quote freely from the poem in order that the reader may form his own judgment, unbia.s.sed by the views of myself or any other critic.

With regard to 'Aylwin,' however, apart from the character of the hero, who is drawn lyrically or dramatically, according, as I have said, to the evidence that he is or is not the author himself, there are still many instances of a vision that may be called absolute. Among the many letters from strangers that reached the author when 'Aylwin' first appeared was one from a person who, like Henry Aylwin, had been made lame by accident. This gentleman said that he felt sure that the author of 'Aylwin' had also been lame, and gave several instances from the story which had made him come to this conclusion. One was the following:-

"'Shall we go and get some strawberries?' she said, as we pa.s.sed to the back of the house. 'They are quite ripe.'

But my countenance fell at this. I was obliged to tell her that I could not stoop.

'Ah! but I can, and I will pluck them and give them to you. I should like to do it. Do let me, there's a good boy.'

I consented, and hobbled by her side to the verge of the strawberry-beds. But when I foolishly tried to follow her, I stuck ignominiously, with my crutches sunk deep in the soft mould of rotten leaves. Here was a trial for the conquering hero of the coast. I looked into her face to see if there was not, at last, a laugh upon it. That cruel human laugh was my only dread. To everything but ridicule I had hardened myself; but against that I felt helpless.

I looked into her face to see if she was laughing at my lameness.

No: her brows were merely knit with anxiety as to how she might best relieve me. This surpa.s.singly beautiful child, then, had evidently accepted me-lameness and all-crutches and all-as a subject of peculiar interest.

As I slowly approached the child, I could see by her forehead (which in the sunshine gleamed like a globe of pearl), and especially by her complexion, that she was uncommonly lovely, and I was afraid lest she should look down before I got close to her, and so see my crutches before her eyes encountered my face."

As a matter of fact, however, the author never had been lame.

The following pa.s.sages have often been quoted as instances of the way in which a wonderful situation is realized as thoroughly as if it had been of the most commonplace kind:-

"And what was the effect upon me of these communings with the ancestors whose superst.i.tions I have, perhaps, been throughout this narrative treating in a spirit that hardly becomes their descendant?

The best and briefest way of answering this question is to confess not what I thought, as I went on studying my father's book, its strange theories and revelations, but what I did. I read the book all day long: I read it all the next day. I cannot say what days pa.s.sed. One night I resumed my wanderings in the streets for an hour or two, and then returned home and went to bed-but not to sleep. For me there was no more sleep till those ancestral voices could be quelled-till the sound of Winnie's song in the street could be stopped in my ears. For very relief from them I again leapt out of bed, lit a candle, unlocked the cabinet, and, taking out the amulet, proceeded to examine the facets as I did once before when I heard in the Swiss cottage these words of my stricken father-

'Should you ever come to love as I have loved, you will find that materialism is intolerable-is h.e.l.l itself-to the heart that has known a pa.s.sion like mine. You will find that it is madness, Hal, madness, to believe in the word "never"! You will find that you dare not leave untried any creed, howsoever wild, that offers the heart a ray of hope.'

And then while the candle burnt out dead in the socket I sat in a waking dream.

The bright light of morning was pouring through the window. I gave a start of horror, and cried, 'Whose face?' Opposite to me there seemed to be sitting on a bed the figure of a man with a fiery cross upon his breast. That strange wild light upon the face, as if the pains at the heart were flickering up through the flesh-where had I seen it? For a moment when, in Switzerland, my father bared his bosom to me, that ancestral flame had flashed up into his dull lineaments. But upon the picture of 'The Sibyl' in the portrait-gallery that illumination was perpetual!

'It is merely my own reflex in a looking-gla.s.s,' I exclaimed.

Without knowing it I had slung the cross round my neck.

And then Sinfi Lovell's voice seemed murmuring in my ears, 'Fenella Stanley's dead and dust, and that's why she can make you put that cross in your feyther's tomb, and she will, she will.'

I turned the cross round: the front of it was now next to my skin.

Sharp as needles were those diamond and ruby points as I sat and gazed in the gla.s.s. Slowly a sensation arose on my breast, of pain that was a pleasure wild and new. I was feeling the facets. But the tears trickling down, salt, through my moustache were tears of laughter; for Sinfi Lovell seemed again murmuring, 'For good or for ill, you must dig deep to bury your daddy.' ...

What thoughts and what sensations were mine as I sat there, pressing the sharp stones into my breast, thinking of her to whom the sacred symbol had come, not as a blessing, but as a curse-what agonies were mine as I sat there sobbing the one word 'Winnie'-could be understood by myself alone, the latest blossom of the pa.s.sionate blood that for generations had brought bliss and bale to the Aylwins... .

I cannot tell what I felt and thought, but only what I did. And while I did it my reason was all the time scoffing at my heart (for whose imperious behoof the wild, mad things I am about to record were done)-scoffing, as an Asiatic malefactor will sometimes scoff at the executioner whose pitiless and conquering saw is severing his bleeding body in twain. I arose and murmured ironically to Fenella Stanley as I wrapped the cross in a handkerchief and placed it in a hand-valise: 'Secrecy is the first thing for us sacrilegists to consider, dear Sibyl, in placing a valuable jewel in a tomb in a deserted church. To take any one into our confidence would be impossible; we must go alone. But to open the tomb and close it again, and leave no trace of what has been done, will require all our skill. And as burglars' jemmies are not on open sale we must buy, on our way to the railway-station, screw-drivers, chisels, a hammer, and a lantern; for who should know better than you, dear Sibyl, that the palace of Nin-ki-gal is dark.'"

But after all I am unable to express any opinion worth expressing upon the chief point which would decide the question as to whether the imagination at work in 'Aylwin' and 'The Coming of Love' is lyrical or dramatic, because I do not know whether, like Henry Aylwin and Percy Aylwin, the author has a dash of Romany blood in his veins. If he has not that dash, and I certainly never heard that he has, and neither Groome's words in the 'Bookman' nor 'Gypsy Smith's' words can be construed into an expression of opinion on the subject, then I will say with confidence that his delineation of two English gentleman with an ancestral Romany strain so like and yet so unlike as Henry Aylwin and Percy Aylwin could only have been achieved by a wonderful exercise of absolute vision. It was this that struck the late Grant Allen so forcibly. On the other hand, if he has that strain, then, as I have said before, it is not in the story but in the poem that we must look for the best dramatic character drawing. On this most interesting subject no one can speak but himself, and he has not spoken. But here is what he has said upon the similarity and the contrast between Percy and Henry Aylwin:-

"Certain parts of 'The Coming of Love' were written about the same time as 'Aylwin.' The two Aylwins, Henry and Percy, were then very distinct in my own mind; they are very distinct now. And I confess that the possibility of their being confounded with each other had never occurred to me. A certain similarity between the two there must needs be, seeing that the blood of the same Romany ancestress, Fenella Stanley, flows in the veins of both. I say there must needs be this similarity, because the ancestress was Romany. For, without starting the inquiry here as to whether or not the Romanies as a race are superior or inferior to all or any of the great European races among which they move, I will venture to affirm that in the Romanies the mysterious energy which the evolutionists call 'the prepotency of transmission' in races is specially strong-so strong, indeed, that evidences of Romany blood in a family may be traced down for several generations. It is inevitable, therefore, that in each of the descendants of Fenella Stanley the form taken by the love-pa.s.sion should show itself in kindred ways. But the reader who will give a careful study to the characters of Henry and Percy Aylwin will come to the conclusion, I think, that the similarity between the two is observable in one aspect of their characters only. The intensity of the love-pa.s.sion in each a.s.sumes a spiritualizing and mystical form."

Chapter XXII A STORY WITH TWO HEROINES

ONE thing seems clear to me: having fully intended to make Winifred the heroine of 'Alwyn' round whom the main current of interest should revolve, the author failed to do so. And the reason of his failure is that Winifred has to succ.u.mb to the superior vitality of Sinfi's commanding figure. For the purpose of telling the story of Winifred and bringing out her character he conceived and introduced this splendid descendant of Fenella Stanley, and then found her, against his will, growing under his hand until, at last, she pushed his own beloved heroine off her pedestal, and stood herself for all time. Never did author love his heroine as Mr. Watts-Dunton loves Winifred, and there is nothing so curious in all fiction as the way in which he seems at times to resent Sinfi's dominance over the Welsh heroine; and this explains what readers have sometimes said about his 'unkindness to Sinfi.'

It is quite certain that on the whole Sinfi is the reader's heroine.

When Madox Brown read the story in ma.n.u.script, he became greatly enamoured of Sinfi, and talked about her constantly. It was the same with Mr. Swinburne, who says that 'Aylwin' is the only novel he ever read in ma.n.u.script, and found it as absorbing as if he were reading it in type. Mr. George Meredith in a letter said:-"I am in love with Sinfi.

Nowhere can fiction give us one to match her, not even the 'Kriegspiel'

heroine, who touched me to the deeps. Winifred's infancy has infancy's charm. The young woman is taking. But all my heart has gone to Sinfi.

Of course it is part of her character that her destiny should point to the glooms. The sun comes to me again in her conquering presence. I could talk of her for hours. The book has this defect,-it leaves in the mind a cry for a successor." And the author of 'Kriegspiel' himself, F.

H. Groome, accepts Sinfi as the true heroine of the story. "In Sinfi Lovell," says he, "Mr. Watts-Dunton. would have scored a magnificent success had he achieved nothing more than this most splendid figure-supremely clever but utterly illiterate, eloquent but ungrammatical, heroic but altogether womanly. Winifred is good, and so too is Henry Aylwin himself, and so are many of the minor characters (the mother, for instance, the aunt, and Mrs. Gudgeon), but it is as the tragedy of Sinfi's sacrifice that 'Aylwin' should take its place in literature." Yes, it seems cruel to tell the author this, but Sinfi, and not Winifred, with all her charm, is evidently the favourite of his English public. That admirable novelist, Mr. Richard Whiteing, said in the 'Daily News' that 'Sinfi Lovell is one of the most finished studies of its type and kind in all romantic literature.'

[Picture: Sinfi Lovell and Pharaoh. (From a Painting at 'The Pines.')]

I have somewhere seen Sinfi compared with Isopel Berners. In the first place, while Sinfi is the crowning type of the Romany chi, Isopel is, as the author has pointed out, the type of the 'Anglo-Saxon road girl' with a special antagonism to Romany girls. Grand as is the character of Borrow's Isopel Berners, she is not in the least like Sinfi Lovell. And I may add that she is not really like any other of the heroic women who figure in Mr. Watts-Dunton's gallery of n.o.ble women. It is, however, interesting here to note that Mr. Watts-Dunton has a special sympathy with women of this heroic type and a special strength of hand in delineating them. There is nothing in them of Isopel's hysterical tears.

Once only does Sinfi, in the n.o.bility of her affection for Aylwin, yield to weakness. Mr. Watts-Dunton's sympathy with this kind of woman is apparent in his eulogy of 'Shirley':-

"Note that it is not enough for the ideal English girl to be beautiful and healthy, brilliant and cultivated, generous and loving: she must be brave, there must be in her a strain of Valkyrie; she must be of the high blood of Brynhild, who would have taken Odin himself by the throat for the man she loved. That is to say, that, having all the various charms of English women, the ideal English girl must top them all with that quality which is specially the English man's, just as the English hero, the Nelson, the Sydney, having all the various glories of other heroes, must top them all with that quality which is specially the English woman's-tenderness.

What we mean is, that there is a symmetry and a harmony in these matters; that just as it was an English sailor who said, 'Kiss me, Hardy,' when dying on board the 'Victory'-just as it was an English gentleman who on the burning 'Amazon,' stood up one windy night, naked and blistered, to make of himself a living screen between the flames and his young wife; so it was an Englishwoman who threw her arms round that fire-screen, and plunged into the sea; and an Englishwoman who, when bitten by a dog, burnt out the bite from her beautiful arm with a red-hot poker, and gave special instructions how she was to be smothered when hydrophobia should set in."