none of them to shine too long.
This comparatively passive creative method suits the subject; for her
heroine has the fate to be born in a land where myriads of women of her
station go passively like poultry along all the tramways of their
parishes; life is something that happens to them, it is their duty to
keep to the tracks, and having enough to eat and enough to put on
therewith to be content, or if not content, sour, but in any case to
seek no further over the parochial bounds. Her heroine, born into such a
tradition, continues in it, partly by the pressure of custom and family
habit, both always very powerful and often deadly in this country, and
partly from a want of illumination in herself, her instructors, and in
the life about her. The latter want is the fatal defect in her: it is
the national defect, "the everlasting prison remediless" into which so
many thousands of our idle are yearly thrown; it is from this that she
really suffers; it is to this that she succumbs, while the ivy of her
disposition grows over and smothers whatever light may be in her. Like
water in flood-time revolving muddily over the choked outlet, her life
revolves over the evil in it without resolution or escape; her brain,
like so many of the brains in civilization, is but slightly drawn upon
or exercised; she is not so much wasted as not used. Having by fortune
and tradition nothing to do, she remains passive till events and time
make her incapable of doing, while the world glitters past in its
various activity, throwing her incapacity into ever stronger relief,
till her time is over and the general muddle is given a kind of
sacredness, even of beauty, by ceasing. She has done nothing but live
and been nothing but alive, both to such passive purpose that the
ceasing is pitiful; and it is by pushing on to this end, instead of
shirking it, and by marking the last tragical fact which puts a dignity
upon even the meanest being, that Miss Mayor raises her story above the
plane of social criticism, and keeps it sincere. A lesser writer would
have been content with less, and having imagined her central figure
would have continued to stick pins into it, till the result would have
been no living figure, but a record of personal judgments, perhaps even,
as sometimes happens, of personal pettiness, a witch's waxen figure
plentifully pricked before the consuming flame. Miss Mayor keeps on the
side of justice, with the real creators, to whom there is