Page 4 - 1912 February - To Dragma

TO DRAGMA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI 73

and her picture of Pekin before and during the siege of the Legations
and her portraits of the amazing dramatis personae of her story really
have something of that quality of the startling and the inconceivable which
so fascinates one's imagination when reading Flaubert's masterpiece. But if
her best qualities remind us of Flaubert's, she has also Flaubert's defects:
the true dramatic sense and tha strength and clearness that come of sim-
plicity are missing. It is a question of artistic vision and manipulation.

However, (and as in Flaubert!) this disappointment in no way detracts
from the prodigious interest of these vivid pages. That interest is manifold.
There's the deep interest of intimate, vivid description of Chinese persons
and things: from the delicate Empress herself, to Sam Wang the tremendous
Eurasian revolutionist, and from the Imperial Palace to the coffin-shop in
the Pekin slum. There's the interest of life; among the Chinese themselves,
high and low; and in the Christian mission—the American missionary colony;
it were difficult to say which set of pictures is the cleverer in effective light
and shade and vigorous yet refined delineation of characters. And there's
the crowning interest of all: the interest of the appalling and baffling problem
of the Eurasian. For the heroine and the hero are both sprung from the
mixture of European and Asiatic blood.

The psychologico-ethnographic conflict forms the story's warp and weft;
but it essentially concentres in the character of Mahlee, the heroine—the
beautiful, strange, hierarchic, alluring and compelling half-caste in whose
blood and soul mingle—ever self-conflicting, ever mutually destructive—the
vital antagonisms of the plebian antique Yellow with the aristocratic modern
White; the savage superstitiousness of the Chinese Buddhist and the simple,
serene and tender morality of the English Christian. This profoundly diffi-
cult matter Miss Wherry has handled with remarkable skill and sincerity.
It would require many colums to discuss the intricate and dazzling puzzle
as it deserves; suffice it to say that in Mahlee we have an absolutely new
type of woman painted with impressive and brilliant force by a hand at
once realistic and sympathetic. For Mahlee is no carven image of exotic
fiction; she is verily a woman, and great is the pity of her ineffectual tragedy.

The Red Lantern is a Romance with many facets. Its pages alternate
from brutal to poetic, from strange to charming, from gorgeous to exquisite,
from realistic intensity and force to delicate humor. By turns magnificant
and naive it teems wirh unimagined contrasts of honesty and intrigue,
bloodshed and peace, pageantry and gloom, literal truth and quiet satire.
The whole of the Mission characters are delicious; especially the Reverend
Andrew Handel, one of the neatest and most merciless portraits of a certain
sort of Minister of the Gospel yet done. His letter to his mother is a
masterpiece. What a contrast is he with the pagan might and brutality of
the Illustrious Patriot, Sam Wang, poor Mahlee's other lover! And the
sketches of the Empress and of Jung L u , the Manchu Generalissimo, are
equally splendid and shrewd.

Whether The Red Lantern be a first book or not, it is plain that its
author is a novelist of unusual powers, and her future work will be awaited
with curiosity. She has something yet to learn in matters of style; but in
the essential gifts of vision, picturesqueness, knowledge of humanity and
understanding of life, she is rich.

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