The Mettle of the Pasture. By James Lane Allen. Macmillan
and Co. 6s.)—Mr. James Lane Allen has peopled his latest book with abstractions instead of human beings. There never lived an old woman so abominable as Mrs. Conyers, and the reader feels that the author in drawing her has jumbled together a number of contradictory characteristics and defied the world to say that they could not exist in the same person. Culture and refinement are excellent things in fiction, but it is possible to over-refine to such an extent that the life of a book evaporates. Then its characters will be reduced to anemic and attenuated ghosts, and the vices which the author finds it necessary to give them will stand out in such lurid relief that the general effect will be a little coarse, to which unsatisfactory state of affairs The Mettle of the Pasture comes dangerously near.
Previous page
