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_Dorothy Canfield_

If Floyd Dell seems in _The Briary-Bush_ to hint at the human necessity
to turn back by and by from freedom, Dorothy Canfield in _The Brimming
Cup_ pretty clearly argues for that necessity. Doubtless it is to go too
far to claim, as certain of her critics do, that she had made a
counter-attack upon the assailants of the village and the established
order, but it is sure that she gave comfort to many spirits disturbed
by the radical outbursts of 1920. Already in _The Squirrel Cage_ and
_The Bent Twig_ she had shown an affectionate knowledge of the ways of
households in small communities; and in _Hillsboro People_ she had added
another hardy, kindly neighborhood to the American array of villages in
fiction. _The Brimming Cup_ sounded a deeper note than any she had yet
struck. Suppose, the novel says, there were a woman who had been trained
in the wide world but was now living in a distant village; suppose she
had heard and felt the tumult of the age and had begun to question the
reality of her contentment; suppose, to make the conflict as dramatic as
possible, she should find herself tempted by a new love to give up the
settled companionship of her husband and the heavy burden of her
children to seek joy in a thrilling passion.

Here Dorothy Canfield had an admirable theme and she rose to it with
power, but she permitted herself so easy a solution that her argument
stumbles lamentably. The lover who disrupts the warm circle of Marise's
life is after all only a selfish bounder, a mere villain; stirred as she
is by the promises he holds out of rapture and of luxury, she would be
simply foolish not to comprehend, as in the end she does, that she must
lose far more than she could gain by the exchange she contemplates.
Surely this is no argument in favor of loyalty as against love: it is
only a defense of loyalty, which does not need it, as against a fleeting
instability; and so it is hardly half as significant as it might have
been had the conflict been squarely met, great love contending with
great loyalty. Yet while the novel thus falls short of what it might
have undertaken it has numerous excellences. It is eloquent and
passionate and, very often, wise. Rarely have a mother's relations with
her children been so subtly represented; rarely have the manners of a
New England township been more convincingly portrayed. The setting glows
among its green hills and valley