Page:Hope--Sophy of Kravonia.djvu/15

Rh to the diary. Yet what faults—nay, what crimes! Sophy had learned to talk French perfectly and to write it fairly well. She had not learned to write English well or even decently; the letters are, in fact, a charnel-house of murdered grammar and broken-backed sentences. Still there emerge from it all a shrewdness and a rural vigor and raciness which show that the child of the little Essex farm-house survived in the writer.

But for this Kravonian period—the great period—the diary is the thing. Yet it is one of the most unconscientious diaries ever written. It is full of gaps; it is often posted up very unpunctually; it is sometimes exasperatingly obscure—there may be some intention in that; she could not tell into what hands it might fall. But it covers most of the ground; it begins almost with Sophy's arrival in Slavna, and the last entry records her discovery of Lord Dunstanbury's presence in Kravonia. It is written for the most part in French, and she wrote French, as has been said, decently—nay, even forcibly, though not with elegance; yet she frequently relapses into English—often of a very colloquial order: this happens mostly under the influence of anger or some other strong emotion. And she is dramatic—that must be allowed to her. She concentrates her attention on what she conceives (nor is her instinct far out) to be her great scenes; she gives (or purports to give) a verbatim report of critical conversations; and it is only just to say that she allows her interlocutors fair play. She has candor—and that, working with the dramatic sense in her, forbids her to warp the scene. In the earlier parts of the story she shows keen appreciation of its lighter aspects; as times grow graver, her records, too, change in mood, working up to the vii