28 JULY 1906, Page 23

NOVELS.

THE SIN OF GEORGE WARRENER.* THERE are signs of a new school of fiction arising in America. Hitherto the novelists who have dealt realistically with American life have confined themselves to the rougher parts where society is still in the making—the cowboys and miners of the West—or they have plunged into impressionist pictures of the slums. What we call vaguely civilisation has been

treated, as a rule, according to European conventions. We have had the delicate genre work of Miss Wilkins, and the hyper- refined analysis of Mr. Howells and Mr. Henry James. But no one of these authors can be said to have given us pictures of what is characteristically and peculiarly an American product. A society based in the main upon wealth, where the dollar is the ruling standard of measurement, must have phases to which it would be difficult to find a literary parallel. The problems will be the same, but the details, the accent, the atmosphere will be new, and will demand specific qualities for their repre- sentation. Whatever such books may lack, they will have the freshness which comes from a novel subject-matter. Mrs. Wharton's House of Mirth, one of the most remarkable novels published in English for many years, showed us this society, —mercenary, crude, material, extravagant without taste, and exclusive without tradition. The book before us shows us the same society, but from below. Mrs. Wharton's problem was the effort of a penniless woman who belonged to a certain class to keep within it ; Miss Van Vorst's is the struggle of a penniless woman to enter it. But while in the one ease the heroine was nobler than her environment, in the present case he is on exactly the same moral level. For the first tragedy society must bear the greater blame, but in the second the woman is her own destroyer.

The worthless wife of the virtuous poor man, who is corrupted by a wealthy lover and ruins her meritorious husband, is a familiar character in fiction. But Miss Van Vorst has succeeded in giving a version of this old story which is far removed from the conventional. George Warrener is a poorly paid clerk in a New York banking-house, and lives humbly in a dull suburban village. He had married a beauti- ful girl Of his own class, much younger than himself, and for eight years they passed a contented, unfeatured existence. Suddenly, however, ennui seizes upon his wife, and at the game time she becomes conscious of her great beauty. While in this state of unrest she meets by accident a certain Paul McAllister, a rich young artist, who owns the only great house in the neighbourhood. He is a professional roue, and devotes himself to what is to him merely a flirtation with a pretty bourgeoise, but to her is the opening up of a new world. Through his influence her husband becomes more prosperous, and, driven on by her, he moves to a larger house, and begins to live beyond his means. He is perfectly ignorant of his wife's behaviour; but he is conscious of a. change in her, and her increased vitality and beauty rouse his very humdrum affec- tion into passion. Gertrude Warrener becomes more and more luxurious and hard. She is without education, without any "fineness," Moral or intellectual, and soon her critical lover grows tired of the intrigue and breaks with her. Mad with disappointed ambition, she hears from her husband that he has embezzled money to pay for her extravagances, and has fled to Canada. Then appears the real subtlety of Miss Van Vorst's art. The wife goes unwillingly and angrily to her husband at Montreal, and there he hears of her relations with McAllister. He returns to New York, appears before the employers he has wronged, and refuses their offer to stand by him when he learns that McAllister has had a share in the generous proposal. The wife meantime makes a last appeal to McAllister to divorce and marry her, and when this fails she, too, rejects his offer of assistance. Both have .* The Sin of George Warrener. By Marie Van Vorst. Loudon W. Heine- mann. [6s.]

thus shown a temporary independence. But they are common- place souls, and are unfitted for any desperate action. The wife goes back to her Slocum house, and the husband, after wandering about in blank despair, resolves to accept his employers' offer, and begins to long for his wife. He, too, goes home, and the curtain descends upon the most dismal of tragedies,—the acceptance by a disillusioned man of a cheap compromise.

The ordinary writer would have ended the book with some Spasmodic melodrama. Miss Van Vorst, with a surer instinct, sees that bold tragedy is not within the compass of narrow souls, and that a sordid reconciliation is the logical outcome. There are many faults of construction in the book ; there are more faults of style, for at times the writing is painfully

shod ; but for the working out of the conception we have nothing but praise. The whole light is focussed upon George Warrener and his wife, and we are never allowed to lose sight of the main interest. The other characters are merely sketched in, and McAllister is a conventional Don Juan ; but the husband and wife are fully realised. It is difficult, indeed, to overpraise the portrait of Gertrude Warrener. No line is exaggerated, and she stands out the eternal type of shallow worldliness,—and yet a living woman, whose attractiveness is as patent as her folly. George is less of an individual and more of a type, but it would be hard, too, to find fault with his presentation. The village life of Slocum is only indicated as a background, but the sketch is brilliantly done, and the picture of the bed-ridden schoolmistress, who is a; kind of conscience to the conscienceless Gertrude, gives the author a chance to depart from the hard realism of her method. The dying woman has her logical place in the drama, and her introduction serves to relieve the book by its suggestion of another world where Charity and goodness may not be wholly absent.