“integrity” rests on very slender grounds, and the Memoirs of Madame d’Epinay are subjected to no such scrutiny as the circumstances of their composition and preservation call for, before their statements can be accepted as authority.  But whatever minor defects may be found in the book, the general spirit and execution are admirable.  It is full of interest and suggestiveness both for readers to whom the subject may not be unfamiliar, and for those who may hitherto have neglected to explore it.  Above all, it is valuable as marking the line to which English criticism has advanced, its capacity for treating complicated and delicate questions with clearness, frankness and entire fairness.

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Pascarel:  Only a Story.  By “Ouida,” author of “Tricotrin,” “Folle-Farine,” “Under Two Flags,” etc.  Philadelphia:  J. B. Lippincott & Co.

The genius of “Ouida” is sui generis, and must in part create the standards by which it is to be judged.  Her works are so different from the common type of modern novels that they demand to be looked at from a different point of view.  The present standard of excellence in prose fiction seems to be the conformity of character and incident to what is actually seen in life.  It is a good test for all mere stories, but is manifestly not the test by which to gauge the recent works of “Ouida.”  She does not aim at this pre-Raphaelite delineation of men and things as they are.  Her characters are idealizations:  her later books are prose-poems, not only in the affluence and rhythm of their style, but in the allegoric form and purpose which, pervade them.  This characteristic is plain enough in Tricotrin and Folle-Farine, but finds its most marked expression in Pascarel.  “Only an Allegory” would be a more expressive sub-title for the book than “Only a Story,” for the story is the mere thread which sustains and binds together a series of parables and crystallized truths.  Most of these, indeed, she has embodied in former works, but nowhere as in Pascarel is the author’s design to teach them made so manifest.

The book is almost wholly free from that extravagance of expression and recklessness of all established codes of taste which have diverted attention from her purpose, and led to a false estimate of the character and tendency of her writings.  It has none of the hindrances, for instance, which prevent many from seeing the magnificence of the conception in Folle-Farine.  Its object is to enforce the lesson that the only true greatness is that which loses sight of self—­that Love, and Love alone, is, both in its insight and its purpose, divine.  “Love sees as God sees, and with infinite wisdom has infinite pardon.”  “Laughter and love are all that are really worth having in the world,” but to gain them “one must seek them first for others, with a wish pure from the greed of self.”  “The world owes nothing to so personal a passion as ambition.”