To me the warmth and pathos she packs into her eighteenth-century conversation, without modernizing it thereby, is something amazing.  For this alone the book would be notable; and it can be proved to come of divination, simply because nothing exists from which she could have copied it.  More obvious, though not more wonderful, is her feminine gift of rendering a scene vivid for us by describing it, not as it is, but as it excites her own intelligence or feelings.  Let me explain myself:  for it is the sorry fate of a book so interesting and suggestive as Esther Vanhomrigh to divert the critic from praise of the writer to consider a dozen problems which the writer raises.

Women and “le don pittoresque.”

Well, then, M. Jules Lemaitre 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 mediaeval 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