Polished Wit--Men of Letters and Politics

SALTACRES is a second novel with many of the characteristics one associates with a first. There is plot without novelty, capable and charming description overdone to create a sense of mystery, a medley of characters, some drawn, with breadth, and reality, but others idly cast off or, worse still, caricatured from the conventional types used by the Victorian novelists. What the reader bent on analysis more than care free enjoyment most deplores, however, is the failure of the author to use great opportunities. Action takes place on an ancient but ill-kept farm, Saltacres, close by a marshy lake and near to a sleepy town. The farm has an aristocratic history, the lake an island bearing an abandoned hermitage and consequent legends, the town a legion of characters in whose existence English custom could well speak and from whose mouths her lesser and provincial lore could proceed in a more complete and interesting manner. The setting and the material must have opened to Mr. Reid many opportunities for elaboration and diversification of his tale. He evidently lacked either the requisite desire, daring, or technique.

For the setting with all its manifold possibilities is worked into the story only so far as in necessary to give piquancy to the romance involved. The tale might be likened to a poplar with its clinging shoots, where it could have been made an oak with spreading branches. The teller has rather sought to show how marvellously romance, like a flag-pole, can cleave space than bow completely life can fulfill, clothe, and likewise protect itself, with fit and simple foliage.

But whatever the book may fall short of being, it passes somewhat beyond the commonplace. If too narrowly romantic, it does not, however satisfy frivolous readers by running too quickly to its conclusion or, indeed, by running at all to the wished-for conclusion. It was conceived grayly and exploits, not the romance of joy, but of sorrow. Its heroine, Ethleen, oddly named, daughter of a mystically minded mother, herself a roamer of the marshes, outlived her husband and her lover to settle down, at last, in serene resignation as mistress of the old farm. Her character is the one real character in the book and, whether, or not it is a complete character, it is the product or presumed product of enough wayward influences to render it interesting.

But, in the main, Saltacres is a study in novelists' materials. Reeds, rushes, weatherbeaten barns, pebbled beaches, a whitish sea, gulls and blackbirds gliding and skimming from foam-splashed boulder to knotted and salt-rimed stump, broken love to the tattoo of sympathetic rains and a pathological religions mania to the cresendo of a venegeful thunderstorm, delight the eye and, chaotically enough, provoke the emotions but the relation of these things to a masterful novel is less than that of sand to granite. Not only should, in this case the parts or particles cohere more closely but there might well be other elements sifted in. One fails to find in Saltacres either character or situation satisfyingly delineated; and it is insufficient solace to turn to the desolate animation worn by the features of nature.