Now, the difference between ‘The Coming of Love’ and ‘Aylwin’ is this, that in ‘Aylwin’ the impulse is, or seems to be, lyrical, and therefore too egoistic for absolute vision to be achieved. Of course, if we are to take Henry Aylwin in the novel to be an entirely dramatic character, then that character is so full of vitality that it is one of the most remarkable instances of purely dramatic imagination that we have had in modern times. For there is nothing that he says or does that is not inevitable from the nature of the character placed in the dramatic situation. Those who are as familiar as I am with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s prose writings outside ‘Aylwin’ find it extremely difficult to identify the brilliant critic of the ‘Athenæum,’ full of ripe wisdom and sagacity, with the impassioned boy of the story. Indeed, I should never have dreamed of identifying the character with the author any more than I should have thought of identifying Philip Aylwin with the author had it not been for the fact that Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his preface to one of the constantly renewed editions of his book, seems to suggest that identification himself. I have already quoted the striking passage in the introduction to the later editions of the book in which this identification seems to be suggested. But, matters being as they are with regard to the identification of the hero of the prose story with the author, it is to ‘The Coming of Love’ that we must for the most part turn for proof that the writer is possessed of absolute vision. Percy Aylwin and Rhona are there presented in the purely dramatic way, and they give utterance to their emotions, not only untrammelled by the lyricism of the dramatist, but untrammelled also, as I have before remarked, by the exigencies of a conscious dramatic structure. In no poetry of our time can there be seen more of that absolute vision so lucidly discoursed upon in the foregoing extract. From her first love-letter Rhona leaps into life, and she seems to be more elaborately painted not only than any woman in recent poetry, but any woman in recent literature. Percy Aylwin lives also with almost equal vitality. I need not give examples of this here, for later I shall quote freely from the poem in order that the reader may form his own judgment, unbiassed by the views of myself or any other critic.