This you will not be able to do
yourself in London, because it is too dark there to see well, and
because your fingers are not small enough to clean them properly.
Bring them here to me, and I will do it for you.'

I gave this letter back to the postman. He smiled and nodded at me;
and then I perceived, to my astonishment, that he wore a camel's-hair
tunic round his waist. I had been on the point of addressing him--I
know not why--as Hermes. But I now saw that he must be John the
Baptist; and in my fright at having spoken to so great a Saint I
awoke.

Mr. Maitland, who edits the present volume, and who was joint-author with
Mrs. Kingsford of that curious book The Perfect Way, states in a footnote
that in the present instance the dreamer knew nothing of Spinoza at the
time, and was quite unaware that he was an optician; and the
interpretation of the dream, as given by him, is that the spectacles in
question were intended to represent Mrs. Kingsford's remarkable faculty
of intuitional and interpretative perception. For a spiritual message
fraught with such meaning, the mere form of this dream seems to me
somewhat ignoble, and I cannot say that I like the blending of the
postman with St. John the Baptist. However, from a psychological point
of view, these dreams are interesting, and Mrs. Kingsford's book is
undoubtedly a valuable addition to the literature of the mysticism of the
nineteenth century.

* * * * *

The Romance of a Shop, by Miss Amy Levy, is a more mundane book, and
deals with the adventures of some young ladies who open a photographic
studio in Baker Street to the horror of some of their fashionable
relatives. It is so brightly and pleasantly written that the sudden
introduction of a tragedy into it seems violent and unnecessary. It
lacks the true tragic temper, and without this temper in literature all
misfortunes and miseries seem somewhat mean and ordinary. With this
exception the book is admirably done, and the style is clever and full of
quick observation. Observation is perhaps the most valuable faculty for
a writer of fiction. When novelists reflect and moralise, they are, as a
rule, dull. But to observe life with keen vision and quick intellect, to
catch its many modes of expression, to seize upon the subtlety, or
satire, or dramatic quality of its situations, and to render life for us
with some spirit of distinction and fine selection--this, I fancy, should
be the aim of the modern realistic novelist. It would be, perhaps, too
much to say that Miss Levy has distinction; this is the rarest quality in
modern literature, though not a few of its masters are modern; but she
has many other qualities which are admirable.

* * * * *

Faithful and Unfaithful is a powerful but not very pleasing novel.
However, the object of most modern fiction is not to give pleasure to the
artistic instinct, but rather to portray life vividly for us, to draw
attention to social anomalies, and social forms of injustice. Many of
our novelists are really pamphleteers, reformers masquerading as story-
tellers, earnest sociologists seeking to mend as well as to mirror life.