NUMBER, WEIGHT AND MEASURE.* THERE is something forbidding and abhorrent
in the label " a careful poem," " a careful novel." . We are all childish and romantic enough to believe that a genius is prodigal in art, flings out his riches pell-mell, and gives gold to a chance beggar who would be content with copper. Order and husbandry, we feel, belong more to the epigonus, the pupil, the systematizer, than to the ardent and original master. But why dispraise either ? " Bring out number, weight, and measure in a year of dearth." These are years of experiment, of "trial and error," and, though we need not be unsympathetic to those who flourish before us their sacks of gilt ha'pence, we should reserve more gratitude for such an author as Miss E. B. C. Jones. She has now given us another acute, sound, and careful novel.
The Wedgwood Medallion has no surprising or reducible plot. It is the study of the articulate and the inarticulate, both women and men, in love and friendship. There are Dennis Ash, Enid Watergate his sister, and Sheila Bendel, all of them instinctive and tongue-tied ; against them are set Nicholas, Gervaise, and Hob Watergate, Hilton Oliver, and Sophie Bendel, air capable of honest and fully self-conscious thought. Nicholas has married Enid, and they are intolerable to each other from the outset. Sophie and Dennis fall in love, become engaged, and bravely attempt to keep distant and unimportant all irritation at their difference of outlook. But Dennis is Enid's brother ; and, sturdy, loyal youth, he cannot stomach or understand anyone who does not think her an epitome of grace and good-nature. Sophie, on the other hand, sees clearly the selfish femininity of Enid, and is attracted by the comradely and clean intelligence of the three brothers and their friend Oliver. Sheila, thoughtlessly and impulsively, seduces Nicholas into an innocent flirtation. This treachery to Enid is discovered, and complications reach their height.
Miss Jones writes with beauty, with discrimination, and with the clearest of heads ; her novel should convince the most sceptical male that a woman can indeed be honest and articulate. It is certainly something of a pity that her intelligent young men discuss for preference such subjects as arrested movement in art, the revival of Tennyson's popu- larity, the Pre-Raphaelites, and materialistic philosophy— the wrong people so often discuss them—but they are intelli- gent. Lucidity, balance, and close workmanship are rare enough to be treasured ; and here is one reviewer who will not sell The Wedgwood Medallion.
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