FICTION.
CHRISTINA'S SON.*
. Nor a few novelists of eminence in recent years have lent support to the now—indeed, one of them is credited with having expressly said so— that normal themes are exhausted, and that the possibilities of making a successful appeal to the reader resided in the exploration of the abnormal It is an old complaint. In his admirable Anthologia Graeca Mr. St. John Thackeray quotes the lament of Choerilus (the Samian poet who flourished at the end of the fifth century over the exhaustion of all poetical subjects : "Happy was the follower of the Muses in that time when the field was still virgin soil. But now, when all has been divided up and the arts have reached their limits, we are left behind in the race, end look where' er we may, there is no room anywhere for a now-yoked chariot to make its way to the front." Miss Letts's novel is, in its way, an excellent answer to this recurrent and secular complaint. In Christina's Son she gives us no brand-new study of sophisticated tem- peraments, but an unvarnished picture of the actions and reactions and transitions of late Victorian middle-class life. Superficially her story, since it deals with the representatives of three generations, has a resemblance to Milestones ; but there is this difference, that while Mr. Arnold Bennett's greatest admirers cannot say that he is a poet or an idealist, Miss Letts is unable to suppress, though she keeps it severely under restraint, that poetic and idealistic element which runs like a gold thread through the homespun of her argument. Christina, who is the only daughter of a successful retired accountant and a typical mid-Victorian matron, has artistic leanings and a vein of romance in her character. But family tradition and domestic influence are too strong, and she marries an excellent, kindly, prosaic man, a good deal older than herself, who dies in early middle age and leaves her poorly off with two children to bring up. She finds her true vocation in mother- hood, and devotes herself to her son, a delicate, sensitive boy, on whom she lavishes her affection. But though he is neither ungrateful nor mutinous, he belongs to his own generation, and illustrates the old saying, "A son's a son till he marries a wife "—in this instance an attractive, heartless girl of bad stock. Laurence is an architect, wedded to his art, and unable to hold his wayward wife, who neglects, deserts, and drives him to an untimely end. The sequel describes Christina's noble if reluctant revenge on the woman whom she had cursed in the hour of her bereavement. The action takes place in commonplace surroundings, and Christina is no heroine of romance, but the story is not commonplace : nothing that Miss Letts writes could be, for she has distinction of thought as well as of style. It is not an "emancipation novel," though the modification of domestio relationships is clearly traced, so much as a sympathetic study of parents and children. And it treats of great matters—motherhood and religion and renunciation— though the scene is set on a humble stage. The story lacks a strong male character, though it contains a really beautiful portrait of the scholar-saint, Mr. Ingleby, the perfect family friend, wise, gentle, helpful, and tolerant—whom even Philistines appreciated, and to whom admit. Lance was always given in times of sickness and sorrow when doors were shut to others.
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