Having
conceived her work thus, she has brought a rare instinct for
probability and nature to the difficult task of combining this
religious motive and all the learned thought it involves, with a very
genuine interest in many varieties of average mundane life.
We should say that the author's special ethical gift lay in a
delicately intuitive sympathy, not, perhaps, with all phases of
character, but certainly with the very varied class of persons
represented in these volumes. It may be congruous with this,
perhaps, that her success should be more assured in dealing with the
characters of women than with those of men. The men who pass before
us in her pages, though real and tangible and effective enough, seem,
nevertheless, from time to time to reveal their joinings. They are
composite of many different men we seem to have [58] known, and fancy
we could detach again from the ensemble and from each other. And
their goodness, when they are good, is--well! a little conventional;
the kind of goodness that men themselves discount rather largely in
their estimates of each other. Robert himself is certainly worth
knowing--a really attractive union of manliness and saintliness, of
shrewd sense and unworldly aims, and withal with that kindness and
pity the absence of which so often abates the actual value of those
other gifts.
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