New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1909-05-08
4 NOVEL BY CRAUFORD.
The Tale Of Tao Lovers IN Modern
Roman Life.

THE WHITE SISTER. By F. Marion Crawford.
I2ro Pr 335. The Macmillan Company.
THE GLORY OF THE CONQUERED. The Story
OF Great Love. By Susan GlaspeL 12mo,
pp. $50. F \. Stokes Company
There is in some sort a touching appropriate
ness about The White Sister, published so
soon after MI Crawford's death. Ippolito Sara
cinesca figures in il. which is to say that the
book takes US back to the Roman life which
this author based his best work. One sees him
in these pages moving on thrice familiar ground,
in the atmosphere which he breathed with
peculiar syrpathy. There is. too. an element in
the story which gives il more than ordinarily
poignant personal interest. Mr.. Crawford's feel
ing for the Church would appear TO have
deepened in the later years of his life. In The
White Sister that feeling finds vivid express
sion His heroine enters a convent before the
Ia ira tive is far advanced. and by TIE time the
last page is reached the force of religious con-
viction has been knowingly illustrated. It is, too
with a humane and liberal act that Ippoto
brings the drama to close. thus demonstrating
the nobility as well as the wisdom Of ecclesi-
astical authority. It is impossible to avoid the
reflection that Mr.. Crawford must have written
this novel with particular satisfaction.
It has the merit to be expected of work done in
happy mood, though it should be added that
The White Sister is not altogether a cheerful
romance. When Angela Chiaromonte suddenly
loses her father, a prince almost more clerical
than the Pope himself, she is left unprotected
against the enmity of the dead mans sister-in-
law. This heartless parsonage, the Marchesa
del P1ato, first steals and destroys the princes
will and then incontinently sweeps Donna An
gela, penniless, out of the house. That unfortu-
nate girls hidebound parent, we are given to
understand, was devoted to the Papacy that
he refused TO go through a civil ceremony with
his wife after they had been safely married in.
church. Hence, Angela has only the status of
founding and claim inheritance. The
man who loves her is obliged at this cruel stage
Of affairs to follow his duties an officer In the
Italian army in Africa, and he is presently re-
ported 10 have been massacred there. Angela,
we have said. enters convent and labors as
a nursing nun. She is on the point of going
out to Rangoon to help care for the Iepers when
her lover, as by miracle, is brought back alive
to Rome. What they to do? The heroine's
VOWS not easily to be cast off in any case
and, matter Of fact. she is hardly the girl
TO sacrifice religious principle to earthly love-
whatever the dictates of her heart may be out
of the perplexing situation in which she and
Giovanni Severi find themselves Mr. Crawford
draws the material for an uncommonIy inter
esting story.
In one respect he might seem to have had re-
p-actised q writer. The vindictive conduct OF
the Marchesa del Prato serves at the outset so
important a purpose in the dramatic develop-
ment of the plot that the reader naturally ex-
poets to hear more and more of it as the end
draws near. Instead of that the theft of the
Will ultimately falls into the background or
rather. is left TO count simply as an episode ac-
celebrating the march of fate There is no rea
son Why il should not be so employed. Theoret-
ically considered, the device offers no violation
to the art of fiction Actually, however as this
story is written, we are constrained to feel that
Mr. Crawford has hoodwinked us a little, ex-
citing undue curiosity TO the upshot of a
transaction out of which he does not really mean
10 make very much. The reader all along ex-
poets to see the Marchesa overtaken by justice,
TO Angela's mother. which nominaIly makes the
wicked woman's act irrelevant. But this curl
phase in the construction of the novel can
not deprive the problem of Angela and Gio-
vanni OF its romantic personalities Mr. Craw-
ford tells his love story he has told it in
so many other books, fngeniously, with the right
sentiment and with plenty of that dramatic in
stinct which was ever one of his best gifts
We read on with constantly increasing anxiety
as 10 the plight OF the lovers We are as al
WAYS. absorbed and amused We value too
the Roman note in the book, the subtle portrait
ure of the social life into which this novelist had
rare initiation. He wrote one of his most
characteristic stories when he wrote THE White
Sister"
The Glory OF the Conquered" is also tale OF