Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/692

 the hard exterior, gives the character something of universality, and the disasters brought about by the weakness which is part of her greatest strength, are convincingly wrought out in the tale.

The story of the way in which her doting fondness ruins her son and brings about the crisis; of the way in which Helena Ritchie saves the situation, is ethically sound and strong, and is told with much dramatic power. The tale is didactic, yet human, full of the play of personality, but a trifle over-assured in its conclusions. Something of the freshness of observation that characterized the author’s earlier work is gone, and, as the book systematically and triumphantly demonstrates its meaning, one is left with a sense that, after all, Old Chester Tales marks the summit of Mrs. Deland’s achievement. In these, the sunny humor, the invincible faith in human beings, and in the power back of human lives, show at their best. Close observation, records of the habits and the traits of people, are delicately balanced. In The Iron Woman the scales tip too emphatically on the side of the lesson to be enforced.

In Ethan Frome, Mrs. Wharton has produced a story of great strength, different in manner from much of her work, and of far deeper appeal. Instead of that amused, satirical aloofness, which gives the reader, in much of her fiction, a feeling that the author is a mere spectator, in no way involved in the human predicament, here is a depth of comprehending sympathy, too deep for mere word or comment, wrought into the very fibre of this tale of ill-starred love. The naked reality of human life and pain is presented with an almost startling vividness; the tale, though simply told, is finely dramatic in its way of following suppressed human passion to the inevitable tragic catastrophe. There is much less of mere analysis, much more of imaginative wholeness of conception than in many of Mrs. Wharton’s tales, and there is an exquisite fitness of character to tradition and surroundings. It is one of the most skillful things that Mrs. Wharton has ever done, and her power of selection, her artistic restraint, have never been more in evidence.

Tante, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick, is a most unusual book, and is, in the depth and the thoroughness of the character delineation, by far the best among the sixty-odd recent novels upon my shelves. It is original in conception a study, on a scale, I think, not before attempted, of feminine egotism; and in reading it one feels that at last the long-looked-for companion-piece to Meredith’s Egoist, feminine to stand beside the masculine, has been found. This has not, however, the universality that makes Meredith’s Egoist seem to sum up the egotism of all types of men; it is distinctively an investigation of an artist type; yet so much of it suggests the wrong side of the ‘eternal feminine,’ detected with keenness, presented with illuminating clearness, that many parts may well stand for a study of the egotism of all types of women. Instead of the passive hero, standing upon a pedestal for the admiration of womankind, as in Meredith’s brilliant, ironic comedy, we see here the active-beneficent, the sham-motherly in all its phases, the self-seeking that disguises itself as care for others. Throughout, except in the rare moments when the veiled, passionate egotism breaks through, as lightning breaks through a cloud, we listen to a bland, masking vocabulary of