Well, then, M. Jules Lemaître has said somewhere--and with
considerable truth--that women when they write have not _le don
pittoresque_. By this he means that they do not strive to depict a
scene exactly as it strikes upon their senses, but as they perceive
it after testing its effect upon their emotions and experience.
Suppose now we have to describe a moonlit night in May. Mrs. Woods
begins as a man might begin, thus--
"The few and twinkling lights disappeared from the roadside
cottages. The full white moon was high in the cloudless deep of
heaven, and the sounds of the warm summer night were all about
their path; the splash of leaping fish, the sleepy chirrup of
birds disturbed by some night-wandering creature; the song of the
reed-warbler, the persistent churring of the night jar, and the
occasional hoot of the owl, far off on some ancestral tree."
Now all this, except, perhaps, the "ancestral" tree, is a direct
picture, and with it some men might stop. But no woman could stop
here, and Mrs. Woods does not. She goes on--
"It was such an exquisite May night, full of the mystery and
beauty of moonlight and the scent of hawthorn, as makes the earth
an Eden in which none but lovers should walk--happy lovers or
young poets, whose large eyes, so blind in the daylight world of
men, can see God walking in the Garden." ...
You see it is sensation no longer, but reflection and emotion.
Now I am only saying that women cannot avoid this. I am not
condemning it. On the contrary, it is beautiful in Mrs. Woods's hand,
and sometimes luminously true. Take this, for instance, of the
interior of a city church:--
"It had none of the dim impressiveness of a mediæval church, that
seems reared with a view to Heaven rather than Earth, and whose
arches, massive or soaring, neither gain nor lose by the
accidental presence of ephemeral human creatures below them. No,
the building seemed to cry out for a congregation, and the mind's
eye involuntarily peopled it with its Sunday complement of
substantial citizens and their families."
This is not a picturesque but a reflective description. Yet how it
illuminates! If we had never thought of it before we know now, once
and for all, the essential difference between a Gothic church and one
of Wren's building. And further, since Mrs. Woods is writing of an age
that slighted Gothic for the architecture of Wren and his followers,
we get a brilliant side-flash to help our comprehension. It is a hint
only, but it assures us as we read that we are in the eighteenth
century, when men and women were of more account than soaring
aspirations.
And the conclusion is that if Mrs. Woods could not conquer the
difficulties which beset any attempt to make protagonists of two
historical characters, if she was obliged to follow the facts to the
detriment of composition, she has vitalized and recreated a dead age
in a fashion to make us all wonder. _Esther Vanhomrigh_ is a great
feat, and its authoress is one of the few of whom almost anything may
be expected.
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