Mrs. Deland is not Hawthorne, it is true, but she is great—her novel is great. It is introspective, virile, uplifting, beautiful. Some of its characterization is superb and one of its characters, that of the old man who knew things, who spotted character when he smelt it as a setter dog the unseen quail, is the best drawn of any book of the year. The idiosyncratic mood of the author—the only mood by which genius may be known—for it alone makes clear the line between man and men—that cosmic idiosyncratic insolence which stamps individual authorship—if it be real authorship—in this, no woman writer of the year has approached her.
In the glow of the warmth of this house of her soul genius, “The House of Mirth” is a brilliant ice-castle in the Klondike, and “A Fighting Chance,” that mongrel thing brought to life by the union of “Lady Rose’s Daughter” and “The House of Mirth”—a thing so clearly marked in its genealogy that one can easily trace each separate lineament of its doughy countenance to either parent who is responsible for its existence—this thing of cigarette-smoking, russet-legged quail-hunting, burning women, and drunken, lewd-doped society adulterers with not a real man or woman in its pages, is the Dakota sod-hut of novel houses.
But if “Helena Richie” suffers in comparison with its great prototype, Mrs. Ward’s book is wiped off the map. In her book nobody does anything and the years of marvelous anguish they go through doing it should give the sweet-sixteen readers who glory in it enough sniffle-nose sufferings to last them till next vacation.
This author glories in heroines a little off-color in their moral make-up with an over-weening desire to do something naughty but never game enough to score down to it. We would love every silly one of them more had they sinned and been sorry. For the sack-clothed sins of real men and women add most to their growth and bigness.
Our sins make us.
Mrs. Ward’s books are all alike, with a little variation in plot and people. She cannot get away from the illegitimate cross in her moral pedigree. Her people are oftener paste-boards, her characters the half-harmonized personalities of incongruous vaporings and she has made her literary fame and money on the sad but decadent frailty of that large, honest, well-meaning, but common lot of us who “do dearly love a lord.”
And these are my deductions: Between Mrs. Deland’s and Mrs. Ward’s novels have we not greater geniuses at home? And between the unspeakable Castellane and Marlborough—haven’t we—honest now, ladies! better husbands here?
John Trotwood Moore.
WHAT CONSTITUTES A SURPRISE
Trotwood loves to take as well as to give and the following letter is too rich to go into any waste basket. I do not know the writer, but it has been sent by an esteemed friend, a colonel of an Ohio regiment who was on the firing line at Shiloh, the letter having been written to him by a comrade now living in California. Of him our correspondent writes: