Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/690

 sketch of a very charming masculine personality, that of Adrian Savage, who combines the best traits of the two peoples from whom he springs, the French and the English. He is chivalric, sympathetic, idealistic, with a fine and exquisite sense of honor, and, throughout the plot devised to glorify his traits, bears himself gallantly. In the dreary story of the starved woman cousin, whose over-intellectualized, under-humanized training makes her a prey to a passion for him which she cannot control, save through death, the ethical meaning is presented with a bald directness lacking in the author’s vividly dramatic Wages of Sin, and in Sir Richard Calmady. The heroine is but a shadow, almost automatically smiling her Mona Lisa smile; she would be far more convincing if some indication were given of the forces drawing her away from Adrian. The attraction of the feminist movement is not explained, and there are no concrete touches in the treatment of her relation to it.

Lucas Malet’s work is always interesting, and has always intellectuality and depth. Here, though there is a lack of centralization there is much suggestive character-interpretation, notably that of the mad caricaturist, M. Dax, who occupies a place in the pages totally out of proportion to his importance in the plot; of the piteous Joanna; of the vulgar and unscrupulous Challoner; most of all of Adrian, who is presented in all the reality of a very human complexity, and whose bewilderment in the face of the crises in the tale is full of reality.

The Joyous Wayfarer is firm and fine in the texture of its workmanship, especially in character-delineation. The study of a man, born to be an artist, forced to become a lawyer, working his way into his own, is an old story in English fiction, but it is here told in new fashion, and is the record of a new and very real hero. The silent force of Louis Massingdale, half English, half French, makes itself felt from the first, in his words and in his reticences, in the potent influence of his personality upon others. In reading you remember your Thackeray, and Trilby, and The Beloved Vagabond, but the slight touches of reminiscence do not detract from the original and forcible treatment of a character of unusual strength and charm. The laxity of moral standard for which the notices of the book apologize is perhaps atoned for by the fact that the hero of the tale resolutely puts the sins of his youth behind him, when his first real experience comes, and the fact that blunders and indiscretions make up part of his sympathy with humankind, which is boundless, sweet, and strong. Picturesque background, picturesque motley personages, and a fine dramatic finale, add to the interest of the book.

Among the more serious pieces of fiction which attempt the working-out of human characteristics into dramatic plot, one finds The Fruitful Vine, wherein Mr. Hichens attempts, without achieving, the impossible in the matter of character-delineation. It is an endeavor to study a human dilemma, in this case a childless marriage, and to follow the play of human motive and act in seeking relief from unhappiness. In cold-blooded fashion, much detail is heaped up around a central hypothesis; fact is heaped upon fact. There is a lack of relief, a dead solidity, an absence of light of intellect or of imagination, in the book, so that, in spite of its explicitness, it fails of an effect of reality. If—perish the thought!—Mr. Hichens had written