the perturbations over her conduct which almost break her heart in Old Chester—­suppose these contradictions might have dwelt together in Helena, yet could Mrs. Deland not have noted and anatomized them in a way to show that she saw the contradictions even while recording them?  Suppose that Elizabeth in The Iron Woman was expected by her community to pay superfluously for an hour’s blind folly with a lifetime of unhappiness and did undertake so to pay for it, yet could Mrs. Deland not have pointed out that the situation was repugnant both to ordinary common sense and to the very code of honor and stability which in the end persuades David and Elizabeth to give each other up?

The conclusions of these novels, which to thousands of readers have seemed stern and terrible, are in reality terrible chiefly because they are soft—­soft with a sentimentalism swathed in folds of piety.  The customs of Old Chester stifle its inhabitants, who take a kind of stolid joy in their fetters; and Mrs. Deland, with all her understanding, does not illuminate them.  The movements of her imagination are cumbered by a too narrow—­however charming—­cage.  Her excellence belongs to the hours when, not trying to transcend her little Pennsylvania universe, she brings accuracy and shrewdness and felicity to the chronicles of small beer in Old Chester Tales and Dr. Lavendar’s People.  These strictures and this praise she earns by her adherence to the parochial cult of local color.

2.  ROMANCE

If naturalism was a reaction from the small beer of local color, so, in another fashion, was the flare-up of romance which attended and succeeded the Spanish War.  History was suddenly discovered to be wonderful no less than humble life; and so was adventure in the difficult quarters of the earth.  That curious, that lush episode of fiction endowed American literature with a phalanx of “best sellers” some of which still continue to be sold, in diminished numbers; and it endowed the national tradition with a host of gallant personages and heroic incidents dug up out of old books or brought back from far quests by land or water.  It remains, however, an episode; the rococo romancers did not last.  Almost without exception they turned to other methods as the romantic mood faded out of the populace.  Of those who had employed history for their substance only James Branch Cabell remained absolutely faithful, revising, strengthening, deepening his art with irony and beauty until it became an art exquisitely peculiar to himself.

Mary Johnston was as faithful, but her fidelity had less growth in it.  Originally attracted to the heroic legend of colonial Virginia, she has since so far departed from it as to produce in the Long Roll and Cease Firing a wide panorama of the Civil War, in other books to study the historic plight and current unrest of women, and here and there to show an observant consciousness of the changing