SNAP SHOTS
Middleton, George
Snap Shots Books, Art, Drama By George Middleton THE THEME which Ellen Glasgow has handled in her new novel, Virginia. (Double-day, Page & Co.) is one of the most universal she has ever attempted....
...There is one very unusual quality which I do not remember having seen in fiction, at least not so beautifully portrayed: the awakening in the daughter to the knowledge of how the mother must have suffered...
...The social problem, Prof...
...To me she is human because she is weak—yet she follows with a certain grim strength her overpowering instinct of motherhood...
...HOW MANY lovers of animals can boast of having domesticated a Tree Hyrax...
...There is, too, a subtler problem involved which opens us to the wide halls of speculation: Of what value to the world is endless sacrifice...
...Mitchell's hand and licking lis face...
...The statement is made that the only one that has been made into a pet is that owned by Dr...
...scenes are led up to but not followed up—such as when Oliver returns to find the child stricken with diphtheria—and there is a lack of proportion in the development of the story: too much emphasis being laid upon background and origins at the expense of the far more interesting later scenes...
...Are boys and girls being brought up to believe that clothes are more important than char-acter...
...I merely touch on these phases because the book is so suggestive of many such themes...
...It becomes the tragedy of many middle aged women today who sit with folded hands as life throws them aside, with their, service done...
...In Virginia's widening experience she recalls how her mother must have reacted when she had touched these same universal chords of life...
...H. H. BEATTYS, whose book on church-going for the average man, Smith and the Church, has just been published, recently created something of a sensation in the papers by a statement made at a woman's club meeting in Mount Vernon, N. Y. "I am utterly amazed and astounded," he said, "at the number of painted faces in the Mount Vernon High School, Girls who paint out the beautiful bloom of youth with a ghastly white and red imitation of the tawdry characters of the cheap melodrama of the great city are seen on our streets every day...
...Many people will see a triumph, in spite Of the sadness, in Virginia's life-but to others it will be a failure...
...To those who will read it for its lesson there will come much understanding and help: to the others who look merely for a story there will be found sufficient episode, color and char...
...Howerth points out, was first a religious problem...
...acter to hold the attention...
...Always a question of popular freedom—freedom, from selfish domination—the form it takes today is, as has just been said, the organization and onduct of economic institutions for the benefit of all and to the special advantage, of none...
...And Miss Glasgow, with rare instinct and understanding, has faithfully focussed her undoubted analytical powers and great human sympathies upon a phase of this family life which should bid many women—and men, too, for that matter,— pause...
...And what is to become of the mothers when they have served their years of productivity and they have had no time to develop resources within themselves...
...and now it is in its present phase an economic problem...
...At any rate, though the book is no plea for any particular "ism"— Miss Glasgow is too much of an artist for that—yet there is underneath it all an intense criticism of many of the old ideals of family life...
...Who profits by it...
...The careful thought, the generous spirit, and the literary quality and finish of this work combine to make it a memorable contribution to the social question...
...It must be read to be understood...
...Chalmers * * * HOW MANY lovers of animals can boast of having domesticated a Tree Hyrax...
...Chalmers Mitchell, author of The- Childhood of Animals, published recently by Stokes...
...All her life is dedication to the home—only in the end to see her husband leave and the child fly away when their wings grow strong...
...Much of this is touched upon by indirection in this suggestive novel...
...She is, in a way, a picture and an indictment...
...Perhaps the answer will lie when we are educated to a self sufficiency which will not be selfishness, a dedication to the universal needs of life which will not hinder the development of the individual and above all a preparation for aloneness which may tohch us all—a preparation, through dedication, perhaps, but which will cultivate the resources within...
...It is here Miss Glasgow gives some of the most penetrating pages she has ever penned and lifted the reader into the realm of true tragedy: for it is one of the grim facts, of life that in our little sphere it is not given us often till too late to understand how others may have felt when we were concerned: What a circle life really is...
...While the story is supposed to be laid amid the roses of the romantic South, with its traditions and conventions, the theme is universal, in that it is happening today in many homes where the wife is supposed to follow her traditional lines of activity without recognizing that she can no longer do so because the externals of our whole industrial life have changed...
...How to organize and conduct our economic institutions so that their benefits may be more justly shared by all is the problem to which he addresses himself...
...But though there is somewhat this feeling of imperfect completion this book is a valuable contribution to the great study of family life which is more and more being dealt with by our writers of the day...
...When her service to the family is gone there remains nothing for her own self expression...
...This is only a stepping stone to something that will eat out the purity of our youth...
...Literary Notes IN HIS Work and Life, which Sturgis & Walton Company have just published, Prof...
...REV...
...Must the world advance— the family, for example—at the cost of the mothers...
...The statement is made that the only one that has been made into a pet is that owned by Dr...
...One has learned to expect strong thoughtful books from this industrious and penetrating writer and no reader will be disappointed in the seriousness of her present work...
...The creature ooks like a large guinea-pig with somewhat coarser hair, and a photograph shows it resting comfortably on Dr...
...Virginia is a study in the tragedy of sacrifice...
...then a political problem...
...Ira M. Howerth, of the "University of California, has written a remarkably cogent and forceful book...
...I am not sure she is an ideal woman—though many may think so...
...Virginia is a picture of many a present woman: she will be recognized...
...The comparative failure of her own life carries its own criticism...
...At the start I might say that it does not seem to me to be a perfectly constructed story: there are wide gaps in the development of her rather remarkably true portrait which tax the constructive imagination of the reader...
Vol. 5 • July 1913 • No. 27
