Rose of Dutcher's Coolly. By Hamlin Garland. (Neville Beeman.) —This
is a very remarkable book,—a careful, and in some respects painfully realistic, study of a country girl in one of the great Middle West States of America. Rose Dutcher is the daughter of a plain farmer who, his wife having died while Rose is yet in her infancy, has to do the work of a mother as well as of a father. Being a man of strong and high character as well as of genuinely tender sympathies, he is perfectly successful up to the time when his daughter, obeying the " inevitable " impulses of her nature, is forced to leave him. Rose is a girl possessing all the passions of a beautiful woman, and all the soul of a great poetess or musician. Now the limbs and agility of an itinerant acrobat have a great fascination for her ; next she is found shuddering at and with Wagner. This book presents the development of both sides of her nature as she passes through the ordeals of school, university, and finally of "society," in Chicago, until both seem to blend and find satisfaction in her mating with Warren Mason, a rather worn- out and—at least temporarily—disappointed journalist, critic, and novelist. The " sex-problem " is too much in evidence ; the author might well have spared us a very unpleasant passage deal- ing with it in one of his early chapters ; and there are too many allusions to folk who lead " clean " lives. At the same time, Mr. Hamlin Garland has produced a very remarkable, readable, and in- teresting book, and is himself a most notable and promising addition to the ranks of American novelists. Several of the characters are admirably drawn. Warren Mason is perhaps a trifle too cynical, especially in the letter in which he proposes marriage to Rose. But the girl herself is a quite original picture of a nature which, though above all things passionate, contains enormous possibilities out- side of passion. Dr. Thatcher, one of her teachers and friends, is also well sketched, though, being a married man, he need not have been made to fall in love with Rose. The best portrait in Mr. Garland's gallery, however, is that of John Dutcher, the plain, pure-minded, but intensely loving farmer, and father of Rose. He is much oftener behind the scenes than before the curtain ; but when he does appear he recalls the country Puritan on whom Calvinism has " held the strong hand of its purity."
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