Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/693

 sweetness and consideration that hides Tante’s selfishness even from her own eyes.

The element of the typical in the character-study nowhere reduces it to mere abstraction, for close study is given to a temperament complex, many-sided, with a result of unusual artistic completeness. The characterization is deft, skillful, and full of concrete touches, and progressive revelation of the central personage goes on even when she is not actually before us, through the effect of the domineering personality on other lives. We are constantly made aware of her pervading presence through the memoranda on the heart and mind of her protegee, Karen Woodruff, so that the way in which this young girl faces the crisis in her life becomes a revelation of the older woman.

The comedy-plot involves discomfiture, exposure of the false and the unreal; Karen, the worshiper, sees her idol’s feet of clay, and is thenceforward free to live her own life. As is usual in this type of critical comedy, there is little change or growth in the central character, only progressive revelation, as Tante becomes more and more hopelessly involved in her own characteristics.

The minor personages are delightfully done, with sympathetic humor. Slight but graphic touches bring Franz before us, the impossible young German Jew of the artistic soul and the kindly heart. The delineation of that unpretentious yet potent personality, Mrs. Talcott, the American 'old girl,' with her clearness of vision, her untrumpeted human kindness, shows that the author has not forgotten that which is best in the land of her birth. It would be well if Mrs. Talcott’s remarks could be studied as a pattern by the many English writers of fiction—Lucas Malet among them—who attempt to render American vernacular, and who flounder so wildly among impossible terms, and possible ones in impossible combinations. Karen, the heroine, is full of charm, and both in her ecstasy of adoration for the older woman, and in her anguish of discovery, displays those qualities of loyalty and truth which long companionship with sham had been unable to weaken.

Tante, with its informing idea clearly and artistically presented, puts to shame the tales made up of an aggregation of details, and also brings out a lack in some of the stories first discussed in the article, which present truth of conviction, perhaps, but evade the novelist’s sterner lack of reckoning with the actual. One does not feel here that the facts have been warped and twisted in making out a case; they ring true; our own partial observation constantly confirms them. But the author’s mind is busy with the high task of interpreting human life, and not merely her hands, in collecting data, perhaps meaningless. The marshaling of idea and of evidence is masterly.

There is a cosmopolitan quality in the work which seems to come from actual acquaintance with the scenes and the types described, and has not the ‘made-up’ air which we find in many an American tale of European life. If there is in Tante something of over-elaboration, especially at the outset; if, sometimes, people and places are over-minutely described, with a loss of the graphic directness of A Fountain Sealed, yet, interesting from the first word, the story grows more and more interesting as one reads on, the situation becomes more and more dramatic, and the tragic crisis that flows so inevitably from the characters intensifies in power to the end.

There is, after all, more of sympathy than of satire in the book; one marvels