n vision and quick intellect, to
catch its many modes of expression, to seize upon the subtlety, or
satire, or dramatic quality of its situations, and to render life for us
with some spirit of distinction and fine selection--this, I fancy, should
be the aim of the modern realistic novelist. It would be, perhaps, too
much to say that Miss Levy has distinction; this is the rarest quality in
modern literature, though not a few of its masters are modern; but she
has many other qualities which are admirable.

* * * * *

Faithful and Unfaithful is a powerful but not very pleasing novel.
However, the object of most modern fiction is not to give pleasure to the
artistic instinct, but rather to portray life vividly for us, to draw
attention to social anomalies, and social forms of injustice. Many of
our novelists are really pamphleteers, reformers masquerading as story-
tellers, earnest sociologists seeking to mend as well as to mirror life.
The heroine, or rather martyr, of Miss Margaret Lee's story is a very
noble and graciously Puritanic American girl, who is married at the age
of eighteen to a man whom she insists on regarding as a hero. Her
husband cannot live in the high rarefied atmosphere of idealism with
which she surrounds him; her firm and fearless faith in him becomes a
factor in his degradation. 'You are too good for me,' he says to her in
a finely conceived scene at the end of the book; 'we have not an idea, an
inclination, or a passion in common. I'm sick and tired of seeming to
live up to a standard that is entirely beyond my reach and my desire. We
make each other miserable! I can't pull you down, and for ten years you
have been exhausting yourself in vain efforts to raise me to your level.
The thing must end!' He asks her to divorce him, but she refuses. He
then abandons her, and availing himself of those curious facilities for
breaking the marriage-tie that prevail in the United States, succeeds in
divorcing her without her consent, and without her knowledge. The book
is certainly characteristic of an age so practical and so literary as
ours, an age in which all social reforms have been preceded and have been
largely influenced by fiction. Faithful and Unfaithful seems to point to
some coming change in the marriage-laws of America.

(1) Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. Edited and Selected by
W. B. Yeats. (Walter Scott.)

(2) Helen Davenant. By Violet Fane. (Chapman and Hall.)

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