hich she turns on him is the application of her own
standard and touchstone. She is perfectly sure of her own; for--if there
were nothing else, and there is much--she has tasted blood, so to speak,
in the form of her so prompt and auspicious success with the public,
leaving all probations behind (the whole of which, as the book gives it,
is too rapid and sudden, though inevitably so: processes, periods,
intervals, stages, degrees, connexions, may be easily enough and barely
enough named, may be unconvincingly stated, in fiction, to the deep
discredit of the writer, but it remains the very deuce to _represent_
them, especially represent them under strong compression and in brief
and subordinate terms; and this even though the novelist who doesn't
represent, and represent "all the time," is lost, exactly as much lost
as the painter who, at his work and given his intention, doesn't paint
"all the time").

Turn upon her friend at any rate Miriam does; and one of my main points
is missed if it fails to appear that she does so with absolute
sincerity and with the cold passion of the high critic who knows, on
sight of them together, the more or less dazzling false from the
comparatively grey-coloured true. Sherringham's whole profession has
been that he rejoices in her as she is, and that the theatre, the
organised theatre, will be, as Matthew Arnold was in those very days
pronouncing it, irresistible; and it is the promptness with which he
sheds his pretended faith as soon as it feels in the air the breath of
reality, as soon as it asks of him a proof or a sacrifice, it is this
that excites her doubtless sufficiently arrogant scorn. Where is the
virtue of his high interest if it has verily never _been_ an interest to
speak of and if all it has suddenly to suggest is that, in face of a
serious call, it shall be unblushingly relinquished? If he and she
together, and her great field and future, and the whole cause they had
armed and declared for, have not been serious things they have been base
make-believes and trivialities--which is what in fact the homage of
society to art always turns out so soon as art presumes not to be vulgar
and futile. It is immensely the fashion and immensely edifying to listen
to, this homage, while it confines its attention to vanities and frauds;
but it knows only terror, feels only horror, the moment that, instead of
making all the concessions, art proceeds to ask for a few. Miriam is
nothing if no