Eliot, likewise Tourgueneff; the "Oedipus" is, of course,
the crowning and final achievement in the music of sequence and the massy
harmonies of fate. But in contemporary English fiction I marvel, and I am
repeatedly struck by the inability of writers, even of the first-class, to
make an organic whole of their stories. Here, I say, the course is clear,
the way is obvious, but no sooner do we enter on the last chapters than the
story begins to show incipient shiftiness, and soon it doubles back and
turns, growing with every turn weaker like a hare before the hounds. From a
certain directness of construction, from the simple means by which Oak's
ruin is accomplished in the opening chapters, I did not expect that the
story would run hare-hearted in its close, but the moment Troy told his
wife that he never cared for her, I suspected something was wrong; when he
went down to bathe and was carried out by the current I knew the game was
up, and was prepared for anything, even for the final shooting by the rich
farmer, and the marriage with Oak, a conclusion which of course does not
come within the range of literary criticism.

"Lorna Doone" struck me as childishly garrulous, stupidly prolix, swollen
with comments not interesting in themselves and leading to nothing. Mr.
Hardy possesses the power of being able to shape events; he can mould them
to a certain form; that he cannot breathe into them the spirit of life I
have already said, but "Lorna Doone" reminds me of a third-rate Italian
opera, _La Fille du Regiment_, or _Ernani_; it is corrupt with
all the vices of the school, and it does not contain a single passage of
real fervour or force to make us forget the inherent defects of the art of
which it is a poor specimen. Wagner made the discovery, not a very
wonderful one after all when we think, that an opera had much better be
melody from end to end. The realistic school following on Wagner's
footsteps discovered that a novel had much better be all narrative--an
uninterrupted flow of narrative. Description is narrative, analysis of
character is narrative, dialogue is narrative; the form is ceaselessly
changing, but the melody of narration is never interrupted.

But the reading of "Lorna Doone" calls to my mind, and very vividly, an
original artistic principle of which English romance writers are either
strangely ignorant or neglectful, viz., that the sublimation of the
_dramatis personae_ and the deeds in which they are inv