THE AWAKENING OF HELENA RICHIE (Illustrated)

"The Awakening of Helena Richie" is a masterpiece of fiction. To find its parallel one must go back to the old standards, and think of "The Scarlet Letter" and "Adam Bede" and "Silas Mamer" as belonging to the same noble company. It has a masterly sweep of breadth and vision, the unerring instinct of the artist, the profound insight and beauty of the poet. It deals with fundamental truths and ideas, yet its psychology is never apparent except in the working out of these truths and ideas in the living, palpitant embodiment of its central tragedy—a tragedy that, to describe it, might seem commonplace, but which in Margaret Deland's words glow with a noble sympathy and fervent fire.

This is not merely an enthralling story: it is a piece of life, it goes deep into human experience. We marvel at the power that can take us out of ourselves, and merge us in an imagined life, yet leave us shaken to the foundations of our being. with the vivid and poignant feeling of having participated in Helena Richie's ordeal; we are thrilled by the quickened sense of reality that has brought into our living consciousness a circle of acquaintances better known and loved and mourned than many who live close to us in the world. There is more than the magic of words here, there is the magic of the soul, the passion for humanity, the absorption of a noble mind in a drama of struggle and conflict composed of elements of inexorable law and ineffable pity, that has been long pondered and brooded over until the author is one with her kind.

The theme is old, everlasting—therein lies its deep and universal appeal—old as the Garden of Eden, everlasting as woman's love and woman's faith and little children; but the strength and beauty and charm of Deland's story lie in the transcendent freshness and prophetic quality of that natural endowment which is her peculiar gift, in its new discoveries in humorous experience, its dramatic surprises and profound vision: in a word, despite the oldness and familiarity of the subject, the temperamental difference in Deland's ethical and imaginative treatment of it makes it unlike any other story we have ever read.

There are few writers of her day who could be trusted to handle such a theme: very few authors possess the essential graces of spiritual insight, moral sanity, and inherent humor equal to the task. It took courage as well, and one can imagine with what fear and trembling and "prayer and fasting" Deland brought forth this really great novel.

We have refrained from speaking of the story in detail for fear of marring its indisputable quality and effect. Suffice it to say that the scene is Old Cluster, that Dr. Lavendar and Dr. Willy King, caretakers of souls and stomachs, are prime agents in the development of the story, that it is the old conflict between the elemental protest of the flesh and the regal and unconquered soul, and that the story itself is to borrow a as beautiful and earnest and terrible as life and death.