Page:The Overland Monthly, Jan-June 1894.djvu/284

220 to write novels while very young, as it often creates a difficulty in more mature years, when the author wishes to be taken seriously, feeling strongly that the work has grown in quality or in strength with the years that have gone by." This is a frank statement of an honorable motive for the book; and the present reviewer would like to have seen it justified by work that was really an improvement upon the entertaining cavalry stories to which this author first set her pen-name. It cannot be said that The Soul of the Bishop is such work. The topic is akin to that of Robert Elsmere, but the treatment is not nearly so earnest, so strong, or so intelligent. It is a matter of course that it is in a way well-written, with good conversations, and clearly defined characters; and where the main points of the controversy are made, they are well made. The story is possible, its experiences by no means unnatural. It has the falsity to life that all novels concerning intense emotional experience must have: namely, that they are essentially episodic; they take no account of the immense healing and changing influences of long spaces of time. In the mere love story that is no serious objection, for after all the reader does not care to see the heroine of twenty in her resigned and somewhat portly forties,—he would rather leave her desolate in the last chapter, facing the unendurable years. But a novel of religious storm and stress should not end by ignoring the fact that honest and reasonable young souls,—as this one in the story was,—come to some sort of tenable theory of life by mature years. Probably the mischiefs played by religious differences in Cecil's personal life and relations were irremediable; but she did not live all her days tossed and torn with agitation, or brooding in desolation, either over the religious questions themselves or the consequences they had wrought. The dull, but sane and not unhelpful, after-chapter of young despair is worth writing; and especially necessary, if one would make a just study of the sort of problems here taken up. The book is a step in the right direction, — that of treating all things in which high human emotion is involved, all things on which vital human experience turns, as proper subject matter for fiction. The theory of art that can find the experiences least human—the side of life that we have in common with the beasts—the most congenial material, while those spiritual agitations that have shaken the world are ruled out as mere didacticism, is a singularly blind one. Nevertheless, it takes a stronger mind and a finer insight to write a good religious novel than a gossipy tale of manners or romance,—by as much as Rabbi Ben Ezra, or O May I Join the Choir Invisible, or Dover Beach, are better poetry than Austin Dobson's verselets; and The Soul of the Bishop cannot be called an altogether successful effort at this difficult type of writing.

We may mention, before closing this review, a child's book, Everybody's Fairy Godmother, which is really a parable rather than a story. It is Californian in subject, written by a Californian lady; it is pretty, even for a grown person's reading, and in spite of a little sentimentality that a critical grown person will feel in it; and children will probably like it unqualifiedly. Little girls will, at least; little boys are not as willing to receive moral lessons in a story. This particular moral lesson is a wise and sweet one, and the story is decidedly above the average of children's books. {{smallrefs{{