humbler characters—negroes and rustic ancient white folks, religious and irreligious—abound in sage observations and comparisons, earthy, droll, bitter or wise, between what the Baptist minister teaches them on Sunday and what they learn when they go outside the church door. The rural humorists in "The Miller of Old Church" could hold their own against any peasant group you may mention in the works of Thomas Hardy. As for wit of the more intellectual order, ironical wit, critical wit, epigrammatic wit, brilliantly serving in characterization and commentary, it plays incessantly through her books. It is a constant aspect of her thought. She conceives life as a brave comedy. I incline to think her the wittiest of living American novelists, and I am not surprised to learn that her favorite authors are Voltaire and Fielding.
Her range of successful characters is wide. It includes all sorts of colored people, poor whites, middling whites and old Southern gentry; poor people going up and rich people coming down; farmers, millers, shopkeepers, artists, poets, lawyers, judges, politicians; children and octogenarians; sane and insane. She has a very lively sense of the power of the family, of the social group and caste, of the community, of the generation. At the same time she feels with intense sympathy the elemental needs and hungers and the ideal motives which animate individual men and women, and make them, for their hour of crowded life, flame out against the commonplace.
In all her novels one is aware of an attendant keenly observant ethical spirit. Her morality is her own, tolerant of nature, intolerant of cant and humbug, but her consciousness is as unmistakably ethical as that of George Eliot. She likes to see the wheel come full
