Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/684

 sweet and lovable qualities of all unselfish mothers, and the book is at once a plea and a warning to the maidens of to-day that they may not permit their intellectual and artistic pursuits to rob them of the larger life of home. It is wholesome, appealing, and genuine in its teaching. Throughout it has an inner fineness, an old-fashioned quality, in its recognition of good-breeding as belonging in the realm of the spiritual, not of the material; and this is doubly welcome now, when in our increasing sophistication we hear so much of the theory that good-breeding is a matter of courts and of cities, and may not be associated with village life, or with lack of wealth.

Flower o’ the Peach sets forth the race wrongs of the natives of South Africa, and tells, in the story of the young Kaffir who represents these wrongs, and of the young English girl who embodies the protest of civilization against them, an interesting tale, wherein both people and background are more fully created than is usual in fiction based on a special plea.

Mr. Anthony Hope’s latest heroine is a carefully studied character, whose experiences are designed to set forth the immemorial social wrongs of womankind. The difficulties in which she finds herself involved through her defiance of the law regarding marriage are presented with true dramatic sense of the consequences of her choice; and the logic of circumstance, through which her act of rebellion for the sake of larger life gradually robs her of the human companionship that makes up life, gives pause for thought.

Thorpe is an embodied naughtiness, reminding one of the little boy in the jam-closet, the boarding-school girl at a midnight spread. The question of the validity of marriage is worked out in light comedy, whence a single characteristic of the hero, the attitude of protest, developed in different situations, becomes the basis of the plot. That there are many abuses connected with the institution of matrimony is undoubted, as undoubted as the fact that humanity has not as yet found a satisfactory substitute, and the spectacle of the young human animal, capering away, even in thought, from social obligation, is not helpful. The sprightliness of the book is full of self-consciousness, the vivacity heavy and forced, and its suggestions as to a way out of the difficulty are neither edifying nor amusing. Against Thorpe’s Way, Mrs. Maxon Protests.

However much one may chafe at times at the limitations of Mrs. Ward’s mind, at that absence of humor which means absence of insight into the deepest ironies and tragedies of life, one is grateful always to enter her world, wherein ideas and ideals dominate, a world so different from our own, with its worship of wealth and of physical force, that, in following, one seems to be stepping into another planet. Doubtless her great popularity here is partly due to the fact that, in novel after novel, she recreates, for the old-fashioned reader, that rapidly vanishing atmosphere of an earlier day, of inherited spirituality, of gracious ways of thought wherein the inner life is more than the outer.

There is in Richard Meynell much reminiscence of Mrs. Ward’s earlier work, not merely from the fact that it takes up again the problems of Robert Elsmere, and that his daughter is heroine of the book, but because page after