The Stucco House is a sequel, but, terrible as that may sound, it justifies itself. The author's previous familiarity with his characters gives impetus to his re-creation of them; and Tibby, Agnes, Tom, and especially Catherine are here more intensely themselves than in the first book. This Catherine, whose egotism must express itself directly, is a vivid contrast to Margaret Lawrie, in whom personal vanity is submerged in pride of family and race. Margaret Lawrie's ambition is for a reflected glory, while Catherine's desire to impress her world expresses itself without intervention, but the two women are equally ruthless types of the female who, because Nature concedes her nothing, demands every concession of the individuals with whom she is accidentally related. The character of Catherine furnishes a notable example of Cannan the interpreter of the present triumphant over Cannan the apologist for the future. Would that it might be always so, for here is a woman familiar enough for recognition but individualized and inimitable. Catherine develops "sensuality of the soul" which she is able to satisfy within herself. She is hugely and complacently oblivious to the nuances of life except as they touch her interest, and is of course negatively triumphant when she drives her husband to insanity. Jamie's existence wasted in theoretical emotions, however, perverts our sympathies, and the damnable simplicity of his wife's motives is dignified by contrast. Perhaps that is why we are suspicious of the defiance of Jamie's son and ready to believe that Mr. Cannan has introduced us to Bennett for some ulterior propagandist reason, hoping to destroy our satisfaction in the courageous pessimism which would otherwise conclude the book.
It may be said in part1al extenuation of Mr. Cannan's speculative tendency that for most of his novels he has chosen the theme which is nearest the life difficulties of the average individual. Time after time he presents the same problem to us in different lights, self-respecting egotism versus the compromises required by sex. There is the childlikeness of the primitive male in Mr. Cannan's plaintive depiction of masculine irresponsibilty, and again and again he strays from the irony of the situation (an irony contained in the characters themselves) to a crassly sex-conscious satirization of woman, or, worse yet, he becomes sentimentally reverent of her biological function. Just as he wrote Three Sons and a Mother and then rewrote it with a difference in The Stucco House, so he created
