Hedged In
By , Author of “ The Gates Ajar,” etc. Boston : Fields, Osgood, & Co.
“ THE book is a poem,” said a friend of ours, on closing this volume. The criticism gives in a nutshell our first impression of the story as a work of art. Its two leading characters, Nixy and Mrs. Purcell, are ideal women. Neither can be fairly said to represent a class. The one is not a fit inmate of a Magdalen asylum, nor is the other a specimen of the average Christian woman, as the Christian world goes. Yet exception to the make of the story on this account would be unjust. Its great charm is its fidelity to the best possibilities of character. We doubt whether literary art can do much that is worth doing, on any other principle, to adjust the relations of fallen to unfallen womanhood. Any such work should be constructed on a profound faith in humanity, reaching out in both directions; to the fallen, conceiving what they may be ; to the pure, what they ought to be. In this idealizing of the two characters most difficult of representation in any natural womanly relations to each other, Miss Phelps has certainly achieved a rare success.
The subordinate personages also are most of them drawn with a singular blending of delicacy and power. Mrs. Myrtle, Jacques, the French fiddler, the Scotch landlady, Moll, Dick, and “ No 23,” are all clear-cut and true. In versatility and in literary finish, the book is far in advance of “ The Gates Ajar ” ; and in power it exceeds anything else which the author has written.
The morality of “ Hedged In,” like that of almost everything which Miss Phelps has published, is intense and intensely Christian. One may think what one pleases of her conception of religious faith, but there can be no doubt that she is keenly in earnest in it. It is not a theology but a life, and she means it. Matthew Arnold would classify her in the “ Hebrew,” not in the “ Hellenic ” school of moralists. We presume that she would be content with that. Yet there is nothing acrid in her moral judgments. On the contrary, she wins by a certain genial and hopeful look at the worst side of things. If nobody is quite angelic in her thought, neither is anybody satanic. With not a bit of sympathy with the effeminate culture which sickens at the world as it is, she takes it to her heart with a sad yet elastic faith in its destiny.