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Rh to follow the sequence in which the volumes were written, but it is fairly certain that Three Sons and a Mother was one of the first of his works to be generally read in this country. Here he attempts an epic of Scotch family life among the lower middle classes and tries to reveal its significance in a thousand real and apparent irrelevances. The author overlays the vagueness of some of his characters with the passionateness of his assumption of the book as a whole. This is a novel of manners in that it contemplates life as lived in a certain time and place under certain social customs without attempting to break through the crust into new ways of consciousness. Here is an eye that reveals the surface even as a mirror but enhances its values and makes it seem remotely vivid as some street scene suddenly shown through the window upon a looking-glass in a bedroom. These people have no more spatial reality than the characters in Wuthering Heights, but, like Emily Brontë's figures, though in a lesser degree, they are for the most part wraiths of sombre vitality, phantoms congealing impressively in the murky subjective atmosphere which gave them birth. Mr. Cannan is shamelessly perfunctory in his relation of those circumstances which lead us to the particular event which his interest anticipates. There is psychological incident here for a volume twice this length, but much of the vitality of the book is exhausted in the author's impatience to proceed, and he bridges the way from one crisis to another by long paragraphs of bald and uncompromising narration. There is a certain luxurious discrimination in the motives which actuate Mr. Cannan's creatures, and they are rarely impelled by necessity in their solution of the larger problems of life. This conception of man as an agent limited rather by the condition of his environment than by the condition of his soul, smacks of the romantic movement of a past generation with its belief in free will. Indeed it sometimes appears that Mr. Cannan is capable only of romantic emotions and that Jamie, his hero, Byronically cursing his inanition, is an exaggerated prototype of his creator. There is a bogie named Tibby who presides over the fortunes of the household and suffers much in the harsh rule of its mistress. We are led to understand that Tibby loved Jamie but was ruggedly resigned to her bad looks and the impossibility of arousing a reciprocal feeling. The indomitable Margaret Lawrie dies and Jamie, her son, goes off to America, hoping, as Mr. Cannan appears to hope, that God may be found among strange scenes and new faces.