FICTION.
TILE PRISONER.• STAY-AT-NOMB readers, who have never visited the United States, are constantly having their eyes opened to the variety of American life, and finding themselves obliged to revise estimates based on limited
knowledge and misleading traditions. In this process of enlightenment fiction plays an important part, and such a novel as The Prisoner is a
liberal education to those who believe that America is a land of com- mercialism, hustle, and quick lunches. To begin with, nothing could be more leisurely than the method of the writer in unfolding hor plea
and developing the play and interplay of characters. But the mono in which they live and move—the town of Addington—might. mut/tie huIarndhl• be easily paralleled in some old English provincial town.
There are people in it—Miss Amabel Brae,obridge, for , example—who would fit into Cranford. It was not untouched by new ways, but it was a survival: " Naive constancics to custom, habits sprung out of old conditions and logical no more, and even the cruder loyalties to the past, lived in it unchanged. . . . The town had distinct social strata There were the descendants of old shipbuilders and merchants, who drew their sufficient dividends and lived on the traditions of times long past. All these families knew' and accepted one another. Their peculiarities were no more to be questioned than the eccentric shapes of clouds. The Daytona who were phenomenally ugly
in a bony way, were the Daytona. Their long noses with the bulb at
the base wore Dayton noses. The Madison, in the line of male descent from distinguished blood, drank to an appalling extent ; but they were Madison, and you didn't interdict your daughters' marrying them. The Mastodons ate no meat, and didn't believe in banks. They kept their money in queer corners, and there was so much of it that they couldn't always remember where, and the laundress had orders to turn all stockings before wetting, and did indeed often find bills in the toe. But the laundress, being also of Addington, though of another stratum, recognized this as a Mastodon habit, and faithfully sought their hoarded treasure for them, and delivered it over with the accuracy of as accountant. She wouldn't have seen how the Mastodons could help
having money in their clothes unless they should cease being Mastertona. Nor was it amazing to their peers, meeting them in casual talk, to realize that they were walking depositories of coin and bills. A bandit on a lonely road would, if he were born in Addington, have forborne to rob them."
Yet it was in this town of survivals that Jeffrey Blake entered on the fevered career of speculation that led to a long sentence of imprisonment for misappropriation of funds. The story opens with his release, which ' coincides with the return of his father to the family home with the two daughters of his second wife, and is concerned with his reception, his regeneration, and his emancipation from the thraldom of a selfish wife. Jeff Blake is largely of the new order, but has his roots in the old. The Colonel, his father, is a sensitive, fastidious, scholarly old gentleman; and his two daughters, though widely differing in temperament, are at one.in their devotion to him and their loyal belief in Jeff's innocence. Anne is of the race of saints, while Lydia is intensely human, forthright, and primitive in her instincts and impulses. She is full of compassion for Jeff, and yet repelled for a while by his roughness and his refusal to be regarded as a martyr. The situation is not easy, for while most of his old friends are loyal and anxious to forget the past, the presence of his wife, who lives in Addington, is a continual source of irritation and anxiety. Esther Blake is a beautiful, selfish woman, already estranged from her husband before the debdcle, who stood aloof from him during • 'Ttia Prisoner. By AMA Drown. London : Macmillan and Co. (Si. yeti
his trial and imprisonment, and made no sign when ho was released. Yet her hunger for admiration was stronger than her sell-pity. As the author says of her in one of those vivid summaries in which she excels :- "Though Esther might want to escape the man who had brought disgrace upon her, her flying feet would do her no good, so long as the mainspring of her life set her heart beating irrationally for conquest. Esther had to conquer even when the event would bring disaster : like a chieftain who would enlarge his boundaries at the risk of taking in savages bound to sow the dragon's teeth."
Esther lives with her bedridden grandmother, a strange, clear-sighted old lady " who looked like a disenchanted lingerer in the living world," who read her granddaughter like a book, but accepted her with a laconic, satirical acquiescence. But the dominant personality in the household is that of a visitor, step-sister to Esther's grandmother, once a famous singer, now an elderly Alsatian, cosmopolitan in outlook, witty, un- scrupulous, imperturbable, good-humoured, and a thoroughgoing harpy. Esther is afraid of her ; most people dislike her intensely while they are fascinated by her alert mind, her wide knowledge of the world. and her professional prestige. She is, in short, a sort of impish fairy godmother, about whom one cannot be quite certain whether she is the evil genius of the plot or its most effective disentangler. So much for the chief characters ; but there are many others, good, bad, and indif- ferent, who contribute according to their abilities and goodwill to the working out of the drama. And though, as we have seen, the novel illustrates certain aspects of American detachment and relates to a period antecedent to the war, it is very far from being parochial in its outlook. Idealists and selfish individualists, generous social reformers and sham philanthropists, pass and repeal on the stage, and a lively episode of municipal politics furnishes the amazing Mme. Beattie with a now sphere for the display of her genius for irregular intervention. The story is not rounded off with a full close, but it does not end on a note of perplexing interrogation. For this compromise, which affords the prospect of an Indian summer of content for the " prisoner," we ought to be thankful in an age which fights shy of poetic justice and happy endings.
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