NOVELS.
THE ROSE OF JOY.*
Miss MIRY FINDLAMER, whether in partnership with her sister or on her own account, always commands the attention, and often the admiration, of the reviewer. Her work is neither scamped nor slipshod, she eschews all cheap short- cuts to popularity, her aims are high, and her outlook on life serious. Again, she has never condescended to rely on the modern device of inverting orthodox standards, and concen- trating attention on perverted, abnormal, or sophisticated types. To this extent she is old-fashioned, in that she prefers to represent humanity as in the main deserving of sympathy rather than as an object of curiosity. But in other respects she is essentially modern. She is largely concerned with the unrest of the younger generation, the difficulty of reconciling duty with inclination, and the disastrous and tragic effects of environment on impressionable temperaments. To call her pessimistic would be perhaps an overstatement, for her best characters are not shattered but purified by suffering, but their somewhat plaintive attitude certainly does not make for exhilaration. The normal reader, in spite of all the efforts of modern writers to educate him out of his weakness, will always hanker after a happy ending ; but Miss Findlater is not disposed to grant him more than a glint of wintry sunshine at the close. In the present instance one cannot say that much • The Rose of Joy. By Nary Findlater. London Methuen and Co. 0243.3
more could be reasonably expected. If Susan Craw ford finally chooses to walk alone, it is not from lack of oppor- tunity to seek more conventional solace for her sorrows and disillusionment.
Susan Crawford, the heroine of The Bose of Joy, is the eldest child of a poor widow, once a beauty, now a faded, feckless, querulous middle-aged woman. Susan is the willing drudge, the good angel of the household, endowed into the bargain with a poetic temperament and a real but unrecognised gift for drawing. She is not beautiful, but she has a quaint and compelling charm of her own, the charm of perfect innocence and goodness. Thanks to the hospitality of an old admirer of her mother's, this modern Cinderella widens her acquaintance and attracts the attention of Daily Stair, a young man of engaging manners, but no stability of character,—a Prince Charming with a dash of the Satyr. It should be added that Daily Stair, though he had no conscience or sense of re- sponsibility, had both humour and feeling. There was an engaging grace about "the creature" and a quick sensitiveness to beauty in all forms. He was the first to appreciate Susan's crude strivings after the expression of her mystical imagin- ings. But Cinderella's peep into the outside world only opened her eyes to the insufferable ugliness of her home surroundings. Daily Stair appeared in the light of a rescuer. She was flattered by his interest and his appreciation. "After all, bow could I just live on at home P I do love him—I must." The sequel only proves that emancipation from domestic drudgery can be bought too dear. Susan realises only too soon that the cares of regulating an irresponsible husband involve the sacrifice of that which was dearer to her than his companion- ship,—" the rose of joy," the pursuit of the mystical ideal in art. We cannot help thinking that the elimination of Dally is rather abruptly contrived by the device of an early clandestine marriage with a servant-girl who was supposed to be dead. Still, we prefer the method, with its inherent improbabilities, to the relentless realism with which some modern writers would have handled so ill-assorted a union. If the mechanism of the plot is a. little artificial, the logic is sound and the con- clusion reasonable. One can readily imagine that a nature like Susan's, in which "everything ran to meet what was lovely, dignified or touched with romance," would not have cared, after receiving so deep a wound, to make a second trial of matrimony, especially when she had the consolations of her art to fall back upon. The portraiture is almost uniformly good. Juliet Clephane, beautiful, kindly, tactful, and un- imaginative, who cared no more for pictures than for astronomy, furnishes an admirable contrast to the unworldly heroine. Excellent, too, in their widely divergent ways are the inane Mrs. Crawford ; her matter-of-fact sister, Mrs. Murchison ; Daily's grim but genuine mother ; and his aunt, Lady Agnes Hamilton, of whom he said :—" I always feel as if I were transparent when that woman looks at me—like a clear gear-case, you know—everything working inside you visible." There is also a delightful child character, Susan's little sister Emmy, whose ambition when she married was "to wear nothing but the richest black silk and to be very calm." Miss Findlater, in fine, when she chooses, can charm and entertain as well as touch and harrow her readers. We are old-fashioned enough to hope that some day she will give us a book in which freer play will be given to her undoubted gift of comedy.
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