ALEXIA.* IT is not often that so much delicate art
is displayed in the telling of so slight a story as this. Not only is the plot so skilfully interwoven with the finer passion of the tale that it is almost spun, as it were, out of the very texture of that passion, —which seldom happens in real life, but when it does happen, fills the mind with that sense of satisfaction which the much-abused phrase "poetical justice " is a faint attempt to express,—but all the sketches of character are complete to just the same extent and depth, so that we seem to be looking at a fine bas-relief where every figure is definitely, though only superficially, chiselled out, and each is in keeping with the others.
Miss Price tells us quite truly and simply at the conclusion of her tale :—" This is only a sketch of a few years in a girl's life, and there is no need to carry it on any further. Alexia and Charlie were, of course, meant for each other from the beginning : they were lovers always, and I shall be surprised if they do not continue lovers to the end. They were neither of them faultless, and both made mistakes in their lives, which might very easily have severed them for ever." But what interests us in this brief but delicate story is the beauty and simplicity of the workmanship,—the perfect ease with which not only the hero's and heroine's far from faultless characters are drawn and made visible down to a certain depth, though not beyond, but the secondary figures are sketched in, so as to enhance the vividness of the principal interest ; the happy sub- serviency of the man's bitterness of heart, as he looks back upon the happiness that he seems to have lost, to the bringing about of the event by which alone he was to save that which seemed to have been lost ; the still happier subserviency of the girl's imperious sentiment to the catastrophe by which she extricated herself, without the smallest consciousness or possi- bility of consciousness of the result, from the ill-considered engagement into which she had entered ; and the perfect suitability of the story itself to give us just such clear and interesting impressions of the other characters as make the whole scene vivid to us. We hardly know whether we under- stand best the somewhat self-occupied and rough lover ; the rather spoilt and self-willed girl whom he loves at first in so very indolent a fashion, though be soon discovers how much deeper his love was than he had supposed it to be, when he finds that he can no longer indulge his feelings with honour; the proud, reserved father who is so devoted to his child, and yet so shy of entering on the tenderest ground with her ; the worldly but frank and tender-hearted woman who at first does all in her power to prevent her eon from marrying Alexia, and later does all in her power to bring about such a marriage ; the weak-spirited, poetical youth who was so near marrying the cousin who could not return his love, and who breaks off the engagement, when he does break it off, with a praiseworthy and honourable but still weak-spirited wail ; or the not altogether ill-natured rector's wife who vents her impatience at the fineness of Alexia's name, and her ill-humour at the disproportionate influence which the owner of that name seemed to have acquired everywhere, by altering the name to
• Alexia. By Eleanor O. Price. London: Richard Bentley end Son.
Alice for her own special behoof, and girding at "Alice Page" with more or less self-restraint as the story goes on, till we reach the admirable scene,—almost worthy of Mies Austen,—in which Alexia rings for the servant to show Mrs. Dodd out of the house. In a story so slight, we have seldom seen so true an art displayed, so much finish and simplicity in delineating the relation between the different characters, and so much skill in weaving a plot which shall really express, as human destinies very rarely do seem to express, both what is truest and what is faultiest in the characters concerned, and that shall correspond so accurately, and yet so naturally, to the expectations and wishes of the reader.
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