FICTION. -
THE SETONS.•
PLEASANT memories of "O. Douglas's" first book, Olivia in India, encouraged the hope of further favours from her pen, and they have been more than fulfilled in The Sdons. It is an unpretending family chronicle, but it is full of charm, and if it ends " in the air " we can only admire the author's frankness in admitting that for her at least a story which begins in 1913 cannot be wound up on the principle of " fiction as usual " ; with " all the strings gathered up tidily in the last chapter and tied neatly into nuptial knots "- much as that method appeals to her. Yet it is not a novel of the war, though the war has interfered with its normal development and expected conclusion. It is the story of a happy family who wore brought up in unromantio surroundings, but were not proud of the distinction of mind and breeding which marked them off from their neighbours in suburban Glasgow. Mr. Seton was a U.P. minister, a scholar, a dreamer, and a saint ; and his only daughter Elizabeth, who was almost unfairly endowed with gifts of mind and person, disarmed envy by her good nature and kindliness. She was a " great praiser," but she praised the right thing, and kept her sense of the ludicrous under strict control, save in the bosom of her family. Sho was, in fine, a woman of the world in the best sense, high-spirited, cheerful, and humorous, who never gave herself airs, and diffused sunshine wherever she went. Of her two grown-up brothers, both out in the world, we only get occasional glimpses, but they contribute to the solidarity of a united but well-contrasted family circle ; her little brother Buff is a delightful rebel ; and of her dead mother we get a vivid glimpse in one of Elizabeth's letters—for she was a first-rate letter-writer—" as the proper-est Mother that over children had. ' Is Mother in ? ' was always our first question when we came in from our walks, and if Mother was in all was right with the world." But though the Setons, and especially Elizabeth, dominate the scene, many other engaging personages are encountered in these pages ; homely, dour, some even ridiculous, but never contemptible. The sketches of Glasgow suburban society and its entertainments are extremely amusing, but never bitter. Indeed, the story serves to supplement a remark of Professor W. P. Ker, in the course of his delightful essay on Dos Quixote, that " there is an imaginative, a spiritual city of Glasgow to be found in the books of different romancers and historians." " O. Douglas " is a gentle satirist, and seldom fails to reveal some redeeming quality in people, no matter how " impossible " they may be when judged by the decalogue of Mode. It often happens that novelists who are in love with their heroines do not succeed in infecting their readers with their own admiration. But Elizabeth Seton is an irresistible creature, by no means perfect, yet attractive from the very defects of her qualities.
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