NOVELS.
ANCESTORS.•
THE late Hans von Billow used to call Madame Carrel) "the tropical pianist," and, in view of the exuberance of her invention and the ardour of her style, the epithet might not unfairly be applied to Mrs. Atherton. This tropical, or at any rate sub-tropical, novelist illustrates the wide range of our indebtedness to America, which gives us "yellow" journalism and the New York Evening Post, Mr. Henry James and the author of Brewster's Millions. One need not travel from New York to New Orleans, or from Boston to San Francisco, to realise that the United States contains half-a-dozen different climates. That lesson may be learned from a study of contemporary fiction. Mrs. Atherton is no American " Kailyarder." She has written • Ancestors, By Gertrude Atherton. London: John Murray. [6e.]
largely on the South and the East ; on the colour question; on Anglo-American marriages and cosmopolitan menages; she has made an exhaustive study of Alexander Hamilton. But it may be safely averred that in all her various excursions into the arena of romance and politics she has always remained a Californian at heart, and that none of her enthusiasms surpass her pride in the historic past and the still unimpaired magic of the Pacific coast. To quote the expressive words applied to her heroine, " No place had ever called her, disturbed her, excited her into furious criticism, mockingly maintained its hold upon the very roots of her being, like the city of her birth." In her new story, which is quite Rooseveltian in its length, she has much to tell us, and tells it with her wonted and uncompromising vivacity, of high life, "smart" society, and party politics in the England of to-day ; but it is not until the scene is shifted to California that she brings the batteries of first-hand observation and intimate knowledge fully into play. But whether she deals with English or Americans, Mrs. Atherton is never concerned to conceal her own opinions. With that theory of fiction which inculcates self-effacement on the part of the author as the highest art she is in complete and constant disagreement.
The formula which Mrs. Atherton adopts in Ancestors is one with which her readers are not unfamiliar. It would be unfair to describe it as frankly that of the roman a clef, but it is impossible to overlook the close correspondence of some of the portraits with living originals. Certain pages dealing with the antecedents, and even appearance, of the hero are little more than transcripts from contemporary history, and belong rather to the category of personal journalism than that of fiction. The fiction is there also, but it is the alterna- tion of the two which is so disconcerting and, to our mind, so inartistic. Passing over that feature of the book which lends it a spurious attractiveness, we may note as its main "motive" the deliberate expatriation of himself by a brilliant and ambitious young politician ou his succession to an ancient peerage,—partly because of a disastrous love affair and a painful domestic tragedy, but chiefly because of his rooted conviction that a seat in the Lords would end his career. But this is a case in which the maxim, Chore/les la femme, applies not once, but thrice over. Elton Wynne has been thrown over by a clever but detestable little parvenue; he is also somewhat embarrassed by the devotion of his mother, an amazing aristocrat, who doubles the role of grande dame and lady bountiful with that of a modern Messalina; above all, he is profoundly influenced by, and more than half in love with, his American cousin Isabel Otis, a Californian orphan of great beauty and force of character, who is the first to suggest to him the idea of an American career. Besides, ho was born in the States and inherits a ranche on the Pacific slope. The second half of the novel deals with the fortunes of the Marquis of Strathland and Zeal after he has sunk his title and concealed his identity under the semi-alias of John Wynne. The time is the present, or, to be more correct, the year that culminated in the great earthquake, and Mrs. Atherton lavishes all her energies on delineation of the splendour, the folly, the charm, and the corruption of San Francisco. The amazing and Amazonian Isabel—reflecting at every turn her mixed Spanish and Bostonian ancestry—acts as Wynne's mentor and comrade throughout, and protracted duologues on politics and the problems of life alternate with tempestuous scenes of court- ship treated in the Katharine and Petruchio vein.
It is all very stimulating, exhilarating, and unbridled, but in the last resort we find Mrs. Atherton more impressive as an interpreter of the spirit of California and the soul of San Francisco than as a delineator of character. Her own burning individualism stands in the way of the faithful portrayal of others ; she is handicapped, as she would put it herself, by a " rampant ego." But she is often admirably suggestive in description, as when she says that " the kindness of English people, no matter how deep, is casual in expression," or talks of the "incompassionate arrogant peace of England." Her melodrama is, as Mr. Lear would have said, "sumptuous and sonorous." The description of the murder of Lord Brathland by the noble culprit is worthy of " Oujda" in her most un- trammelled mood; so, too, is the picture of that enchanting tigress, Lady Victoria, as an "ivory female Colossus, only her eyes burning down with slow voluptuous fire upon an adoring little Frenchman." Occasionally Mrs. Atherton's style puzzles
the simple Britisher, as when she uses such words as " abet- ment" or "indefectible," or imparts a new thrill by such a sentence as the following : "Isabel held her cigarette poised in one slender hand, letting her eyes fall deliberately on the broad back and flat nails of the exquisitely kept section on Mrs. Kaye's lap." The book is inordinately long, and at times verbose to turgidity, but it has a passion, an eloquence, and a picturesqueness that go far to neutralise its glaring defects of style and temper. If Mrs. Atherton's self-criticism were equal to her volcanic energy, she would be a great instead of a brilliant novelist.
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