its characters. Some one, I think Mr. Walkley, dissented, maintaining rather that a novel lives by its characteristics—by the sum of all the qualities which the author puts into it.
That amounts, perhaps, to saying that a novel lives by, or on, the character of its author. If that appears true of a single novel, it appears more strikingly true when one reflects upon the entire work of a novelist after one is familiar with it, and his books have run together and made a little world in one's mind. For my part, at any rate, I seldom step into the world of Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë, of Thackeray or Thomas Hardy or Conrad, looking for any one in particular. I revisit these scenes because I like the weather, sunlit or stormy, because I relish a certain feeling in the air, which I know, when I analyze it, is the pervasive effect of the writer's personality.
For several days now I have been living happily in Ellen Glasgow's world. I attempt to take my satisfaction to pieces, and I find myself cataloging her abundant powers. I like her clear sense of the elemental things in human life and her sense of the profound interdependence of man and nature. She delights by her talent for presenting the wonder and bloom of Virginian gardens and country-side. Go where you will in her Southern world, there is perfume in the sunlit air, hyacinths and the scent of wild grapes and microphylla roses; there are the budding sycamore and the foam of dogwood and red bud; sparrows rustle among the Virginia creepers, thrushes sing, bluebirds and red-winged blackbirds flicker over the pastures; sunsets glow behind dark pines; there is the sound of water flowing.
Of her humor one could write a chapter. Her
