CONSTABLE & CO LTD, London 1930
Novels and Novelists
A ‘Real’ Book and an Unreal One
A Post-War and a Victorian Novel
[The text follows the first Constable & Co. edition.]
From April 1919 to December 1920 Katherine Mansfield regularly reviewed fiction for The Athenæum, giving up only when incapacitated by illness.
Her reviews are here printed in chronological order, since any other arrangement would make meaningless her not infrequent allusions to books previously reviewed, or to her previous reviews of books.
For this reason the attempt to make a selection from them has been abandoned. Taken all together, they form a body of criticism unique in its kind. It is to be regretted that accidents of publication, or editorial necessities, prevented her from giving her opinion on certain eminent novelists. The most notable omissions are H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and D. H. Lawrence. In order to give some record at least of her admiration for the work of D. H. Lawrence, a little note pencilled in her copy of Aaron’s Rod, but not intended for publication, has been included.
J. M. M.
Agate, James, 140.
Aumonier, Stacy, 196
Austin, Jane, 302
Bagnold, Enid, 223
Barker, D. A., 221
Benson, Stella, 103
Beresford, J. D., 170
Birmingham, George, 283
Brendon, Anthony, 45
Bretherton, R. H., 170
Brighouse, Harold, 178
Broughton, Rhoda, 244
Brown, Ivor, 178
Bryher, W., 229
Burgin, G. B., 163
Burr, Jane, 274
Calthrop, D. Clayton, 167
Carswell, Catherine, 209
Clarke, Isabel, 252
Creighton, Basil, 263
Cummins, G. D., 55
Dane, Clemence, 118
Dawson-Scott, C. A., 274
Desmond, Shaw, 191
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 111
Dudeney, Mrs. H., 293
Easton, Dorothy, 211
Ervine, St. John, 221
Evans, Havel, 53
Forster, E. M., 237
Frankau, Gilbert, 155
Futabatei, 189
Fyfe, Hamilton, 283
Gaunt, Mary, 167
Goldring, Douglas, 174
Haggard, H. Rider, 159
Hamsun, Knut, 203
Hay, William, 50
Heanley, G. E., 263
Herbert, A. P., 266
Hergesheimer, Joseph, 38, 151, 227
Hewlett, Maurice, 133
Holme, Constance, 99
Hudson, Stephen, 99
Ibañez, Vincente Blasco, 47
Jerome, Jerome K., 142
Johnston, Sir Harry, 14
Jones, E. B. C., 293
Kuprin, Alexander, 130
Lawrence, D. H., 308
Leadbitter, Eric, 152
London, Jack, 246
Lowndes, Mrs. Belloc, 193
Lucas, E. V., 254
Lunn, Arnold, 20
Macnaughton, S., 11
McKenna, Stephen, 283
Malet, Lucas, 201
Mander, Jane, 217
Marshall, Archibald, 167
Maugham, W. Somerset, 17
Mayne, E. Colburn, 137
Methley, Violet M., 165
Millin, S. G., 155
Monkhouse, Allan, 114
Moore, George, 233
Mordaunt, Eleanor, 137
Morgan, William de, 70
Newte, H. W. C., 259
Niven, F., 263
Oldmeadow, E., 146
O’Riordan, C., 288
Owen, Ashford, 183
Pain, Barry, 159
Palmer, Arnold, 211
Peake, C. M. A., 152
Penny, F. E., 81
Pett-Ridge, W., 297
Philips, David Graham, 76
Pickthall, M., 144
Prowse, R. O., 279
Rickard, Mrs. Victor, 1.
Robins, Elizabeth, 211
Sackville-West, V., 29
Sedgwick, Anne Douglas, 197
Seymour, Beatrice Kean, 142
Shanks, Edward, 283
Sheppard, A. T., 256
Skelton, Margaret, 187
Stacpoole, H. de V., 297
Stein, Gertrude, 273
Stevenson, George, 126
Swinnerton, Frank, 84
Symonds, Margaret, 217
Tomlinson, H. M., 9
Undset, Sigrid, 232
Vachell, H. A., 266
Weigall, Arthur, 193
Weyman, Stanley, 99
Wharton, Edith, 304
Willcocks, M. P., 67
Wilson, Romer, 103
Worth, Patience, 1
[1] Hope Trueblood — By Patience Worth
The House of Courage — By Mrs. Victor Rickard
The Tunnel — By Dorothy Richardson
Very often, after reading a modern novel, the question suggests itself: Why was it written? And the answer is not always immediate. Indeed, there is no answer; it is perhaps a little reflection on our present authors that there can be so many and of so diverse a kind. One of our famous young novelists half solves the problem for us by stating, in a foreword to his latest book, that he wrote it because he could not help himself, because he was ‘compelled’ to—but half solves it only. For we cannot help wondering, when the book is finished and laid by, as to the nature of that mysterious compulsion. It is terrifying to think of the number of novels that are written and announced and published and to be had of all libraries, and reviewed and bought and borrowed and read, and left in hotel lounges and omnibuses and railway carriages and deck chairs. Is it possible to believe that each one of them was once the darling offspring of some proud author,—his cherished hope in whom he lives his second richer life?
Public Opinion, garrulous, lying old nurse that she is, cries: ‘Yes! Great books, immortal books are being born every minute, each one more lusty than the last. Let him who is without sin among you cast the first criticism.’ It would be a superb, thrilling world if this were true! Or if even a very moderate number of them were anything but little puppets, little make-believes, playthings on strings with the same stare and the same sawdust filling, just unlike enough to keep the attention distracted, but all like enough to do nothing more profound. After all, in these lean years of plenty how could it be otherwise? Not even the most hardened reader, at the rate books are [2] written and read nowadays, could stand up against so many attacks upon his mind and heart, if it were. Reading, for the great majority—for the reading public—is not a passion but a pastime, and writing, for the vast number of modern authors, is a pastime and not a passion.
Miss Patience Worth’s ‘Hope Trueblood’ is almost too good an example of the pastime novel. It never for one moment touches the real world or the realm of fäery, preferring to linger in that ‘valley of soft springs’ which lies between, where every echo is a sigh, every voice a cry upon the wind, where Melodrama has his castle and Sentimentality is the weeping lady of the tower.
The story is an old one; it is the Bastard’s Progress. A little child without a father is left at her mother’s death to the cruel mercies of a virtuous village. Although she has the ‘sunshine smile’ and: ‘there is a bud here, I beat my heart over,’ she is doomed. She is the little innocent lamb branded with the sign of shame who must be sacrificed. To make this tragedy more pitiful, Miss Worth causes her lamb to speak in a special language, a kind of theatrical pot-pourri, and by the time the end is reached there is not a device or an ornament left in the property-box. Even the symbolic white butterfly has flown into the air: ‘Up-up-up!’ Added to this, Miss Worth has thrown over all a veil of mystery which never is lifted wholly. Now and again a corner flutters, but if we venture to look beneath it is dropped again—and our curiosity with it.
‘Can you read this, O reader? Try! Try! for my foolish tears are flowing and I cannot see.’ It would require a simple soul indeed to be beguiled by such mock pearls. But we stand amazed before her publisher’s announcement. However much support she may need, it is surely unfair to announce her with so extraordinary a flourish of trumpets without. This is lion’s music and should be kept for their coming.
Mrs. Victor Rickard is a skilled competent writer of a very different type of book. The theme of her ‘House of [3] Courage’ is not new; nor is there, in her treatment of it, a variation with which we have not become familiar during the past four years. There are the opening scenes before the war, light, domestic, carefree, with the principal love interest just beginning, followed by the gathering storm, then the war itself, threatening to destroy everything, but not destroying everything, and then the afterglow, which is like the opening scene, but richer, more sober, and with the principal love interest fulfilled. To write this type of work successfully it is essential that all the characters should be of the same class—the men, well-bred, well-dressed, and ‘thorough sportsmen’—the women, equally well bred and dressed and the cheeriest of souls. The atmosphere must be an upper middle-class atmosphere and, even if the ‘sheer horror of it all’ threatens to engulf them, one golden rule must be observed: they never give way. For these are not real whole people; they are aspects of people, living examples of appropriate and charming behaviour before and during the war. All this Mrs. Rickard knows and understands. From the first paragraph the story flows from her easy pen with unwavering fluency, one of those hundreds of novels which do not send you to sleep, but—do not keep you awake.
Why was it written? The question does not present itself—it is the last question one would ask after reading ‘The Tunnel.’ Miss Richardson has a passion for registering every single thing that happens in the clear, shadowless country of her mind. One cannot imagine her appealing to the reader or planning out her novel; her concern is primarily, and perhaps ultimately, with herself. ‘What cannot I do with this mind of mine!’ one can fancy her saying. ‘What can I not see and remember and express?’ There are times when she seems deliberately to set it a task, just for the joy of realizing again how brilliant a machine it is, and we, too, share her admiration for its power of absorbing. Anything that goes into her mind she can summon forth again, and there it is, complete in every detail, with nothing taken away from it—and [4] nothing added. This is a rare and interesting gift, but we should hesitate before saying it was a great one.
‘The Tunnel’ is the fourth volume of Miss Richardson’s adventures with her soul-sister, Miriam Henderson. Like them, it is composed of bits, fragments, flashing glimpses, half scenes and whole scenes, all of them quite distinct and separate, and all of them of equal importance. There is no plot, no beginning, middle or end. Things just ‘happen’ one after another with incredible rapidity and at break-neck speed. There is Miss Richardson, holding out her mind, as it were, and there is Life hurling objects into it as fast as she can throw. And at the appointed time Miss Richardson dives into its recesses and reproduces a certain number of these treasures—a pair of button boots, a night in Spring, some cycling knickers, some large, round biscuits—as many as she can pack into a book, in fact. But the pace kills.
There is one who could not live in so tempestuous an environment as her mind—and he is Memory. She has no memory. It is true that Life is sometimes very swift and breathless, but not always. If we are to be truly alive there are large pauses in which we creep away into our caves of contemplation. And then it is, in the silence, that Memory mounts his throne and judges all that is in our minds—appointing each his separate place, high or low, rejecting this, selecting that—putting this one to shine in the light and throwing that one into the darkness.
We do not mean to say that those large, round biscuits might not be in the light, or the night in Spring be in the darkness. Only we feel that until these things are judged and given each its appointed place in the whole scheme, they have no meaning in the world of art.
(April 4, 1919.)
[5] Christopher and Columbus — By the author of ‘Elizabeth and her German Garden’
What Not — By Rose Macaulay
If one pauses to consider the nature of that very considerable number of novels concerned with the fortunes of young females who fly out of the home nest, one is almost tempted to believe that they are written by the forsaken parents themselves. The mind conjures up a vision of those solitary ones sitting by the bedside of their wounded pride, and distracting it from its pains with these horrific tales of the torments and disasters which must inevitably overtake the bold, guilty stray. Who else would find the same gloomy relish in making the very worst of it—in picturing a path one simply cannot see for lions? Who else would dare to end upon that lullaby note—with such a sting in it!—the peaceful, happy ending with the good simple man whom she might, far more suitably and comfortably, have met in her own mother’s drawing-room?
One likes to think that the escaped children are too happy to bother about proving their parents to be wrong. Nevertheless, one does wish sometimes that their song was not quite without words. True, no bird, however golden, flies fully fledged from the nest up into the sun. But trying your wings, so long as you are perfectly certain that you have wings to try, so long as you are confident that you fall only to rise again, and that all these little essays and flutters are but the prelude to exquisite flight, need not of necessity be tragic.
Christopher and Columbus, the twin orphans and heroines of ‘Elizabeth’s’ novel, are, indeed, the most unconscious but radiant little proofs to the contrary, in spite of the fact that they do not fly of their own accord, but are quite unmercifully thrown at a tender age, at just seventeen, with their hair still in gold and silver pigtails [6] and with ‘perambulator faces,’ from England to America, in the middle of the war, by that loyal British citizen their Uncle Arthur.
It is true, the poor man had provocation. For although they had been brought up to love England and Milton and Wordsworth above all other loves by their mother, Uncle Arthur’s sister-in-law, they were the children of a German father, a von Twinkler. And whenever they opened their mouths, which was very often, out their disgraceful r’s came rolling right under the infinitely suspicious and patriotic noses of Uncle Arthur’s friends. This was not to be borne; Uncle Arthur did not bear it. He equipped them with two introductions, two hundred pounds and two second-class fares, and sent them flying. The delightful miracle is that, helped by Mr. Twist, of Twist’s Non-Trickler Teapot fame, from the very first moment they flew.
We shudder to think what might have happened had the twins not been twins, but Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas rolled into one, and had Mr. Twist not been ‘a born mother.’ America certainly did not help them. That great heart beat very fast and hard at the sight of their innocence and childish unbroken courage, but curiosity, suspicion and the tingling air of scandal set it going; America turned her broad back, but looked over her shoulder and coldly, frigidly stared. So well is the devastating quality of that glance conveyed that it might serve as a warning never to go to America with nothing but your own watery reflection in the mirror for prop and comfort, for a shadow twin, as it were, and never to find yourself in America with a young man who does not glory, as Mr. Twist gloried, in the fact of his being a mother.
But, after all, when the triumph of the twins is complete even to wedding bells, these two advantages, great as they are, do not explain it wholly. Above and through everything runs their laughter—their laughing comment upon the grown-up world and its ways. And this it is which is irresistible.
[7] We are still very dazed, very dumb and stiff after the four years’ winter sleep; the winter has lasted too long; our sleep has been like death. We are dazed creatures, ‘lizards of convalescence,’ creeping back into the sun. And then, in the quiet, we hear Christopher and Columbus laughing—laughing at everything. Is it not cruel to make merry after such a winter? But they themselves are spring. Round-eyed and even a little unsteady, they wander among these preposterous grown-ups, the big, fat, cold-blooded ones and the lean elderly prying ones, never dreaming that these same grown-ups could, in an instant, turn—not into lions, perhaps, but into malignant toads and spiders.
‘Elizabeth’ appreciates their danger, for the minds of toads and spiders are open books to her. But having them by heart, she, with her delicate impatient pen, is not in the least tempted to make a solemn copy of them. All that she wants she can convey with a comment—at a stroke. There is a whole volume for one of our psychological authors in Mr. Twist’s quarrel with his mother; she dismisses it in a little chapter.
And therein perhaps lies her value as a writer; she is, in the happiest way, conscious of her own particular vision, and she wants no other. She is so enchanted with the flowers growing in the path she has chosen that she has not, as the twins might say, a ‘single eye to spare’ for her neighbours. In a world where there are so many furies with warning fingers it is good to know of someone who goes on her way finding a gay garland, and not forgetting to add a sharp-scented spray or two and a bitter herb that its sweetness may not cloy.
‘What Not,’ Miss Rose Macaulay’s brilliant little comedy, is played in a vastly different world. One does not dream of questioning the large freedoms enjoyed by the heroine, Miss Kitty Grammont; one can only admire her excellent control of them. Dare we hope that this fascinating creature is the fore-runner of the business woman, the ‘political’ woman, the woman whose [8] business it is to help to govern the country? Miss Macaulay presents us to her when she is attached to the Ministry of Brains—a vast organization which has been started after the war to control, stimulate, reward and punish the brains of the nation, and to safeguard the intellects of the Great Unborn. The wonderful system of classification with which we have become so familiar serves this time a twofold purpose; it not only registers the mental category of every man and woman in England, it also tells him or her whom to marry and whom not to marry. Miss Grammont, whose brains were of the highest order, was classified ‘A’; but the Minister of Brains, for all his brilliant powers, was uncertificated for matrimonial purposes because of mental deficiency in his family. He was ‘A’ (Deficiency), and thereby hangs the tale. Moving spirits though they are of Brains Week, the Mental Progress Act, the Mind Training Bill and the great Explanation Campaign, they find their official co-partnership inadequate, and as though these obstacles were nothing more than convenient stiles to lean across, like any simple two, they fall in love. Realizing ‘it will come out as certainly as flowers in spring or the Clyde engineers next week,’ they marry. And it does come out. The dreadful truth wrecks the Ministry of Brains and ruins their careers, but leaves them ‘laughing ruefully.’
This is the bare theme from which Miss Macaulay composes her ingenious and delightful variations. Although one feels her fertility of invention is so great that nothing would be easier for her than to obtain an ‘easy effect,’ it is their chief excellence that each one is as unexpected as the last. It is only in the enjoyment of Miss Macaulay’s nice sense of humour, matched with her fine, sensitive style, that one realizes how rarely the two qualities are found together. We are so accustomed to the horse without the rider, roaming very free, or the rider very desperate, looking for the horse.
(April 4, 1919.)
[9] Old Junk — By H. M. Tomlinson
There are times when one is tempted to make a kind of childish division of mankind into two groups and to say: ‘These are the men who live on the land and these are they whose home is the sea.’ Is the division quite idle? Perhaps it were better to say: ‘These are the men who are ruled by the land and these who are governed by the sea.’ For you may meet the citizens of the sea far away from their own kingdom, carried away, to all outward resemblance, and absorbed by the immediate life of the land, yet are they never other than foreigners; their glance, however keen and discerning, still is a wondering glance; and what they discover is not the familiarity of things, but their strangeness. They see it all like this because they have just ‘come off the ship,’ as it were. For long they have been identified with the moving waters, the changing skies, winds, stars, the dawn running into bright day, and evening falling on the fields of night. This is the life, changing, but ever changeless, in which men live nearest to that which enchants them, and to that which threatens to overwhelm them. Here the terrible monotony of ceaseless distraction is unknown; neither can men die that wilful first death to all outward things as they can on land—refusing to look any longer upon the sky or to care whether the wind be foul or fair. But through everything it is the calmness of those sea-governed men which compels us most. Shall we of the land ever be calm again? Shall we ever find our way out of this hideous Exhibition with its lights and bands and wounded soldiers and German guns? There is a quivering madness in all this feverish activity. Perhaps we are afraid that when we do reach the last turnstile we shall push one another over the edge of the world, into space—into darkness.
It is at times like these that we find it extraordinary [10] comfort to have in our midst a citizen of the sea, a writer like Mr. H. M. Tomlinson. We feel that he is calm, not because he has renounced life, but because he lives in the memory of that solemn gesture with which the sea blesses or dismisses or destroys her own. The breath of the sea sounds in all his writings. Whether he tells of an accident at a mine-head, or the front-line trenches in Flanders, or children dancing, or books to read at midnight—if we listen, it is there and we are not deceived. There is a quality of remoteness and detachment in his work, but it is never because he has turned aside from life. On the contrary he steps ashore and is passionately involved in it. Deliberately he enters into the anguish of experience and suffering; he gives himself to it because of his great love for human beings; yet the comfort of being ‘lost’—of being just a part of the whole and merged in it—is denied him. He is always that foreigner with keen wondering glance, thinking over the strangeness of it all….
And when life is not tragic, when children dance, or he visits the African Coast, or a lonely little grocer’s boy shows him his home-made ‘wireless,’ then are we conscious of his unbroken, unspoilt joy in lovely things and funny ones. He is alive; real things stir him profoundly. He has no need to exaggerate or heighten his effects. One is content to believe that what he tells you happened to him and it was the important thing; it was the spiritual truth which was revealed. This is the life, changeless and changing, wonderfully conveyed to us in the pages of ‘Old Junk.’ There is a quality in the prose that one might wish to call ‘magic’; it is full of the quivering light and rainbow colours of the unsubstantial shore. One might dream as one puts the book down that one has only to listen, to hear the tide, on the turn, then sweeping in full and strong.
(April 18, 1919.)
[11] My War Experiences in Two Continents. — By S. Macnaughtan
In the beginning of this book there is a portrait of a little lady sitting upright and graceful in a high-backed chair. She wears an old-world, silk brocade gown fastened with a row of little buttons. There is fine lace at the neck, and a delicate scarf slips from her shoulders. As she leans her cheek on two fingers her intent, unsmiling gaze is very gentle. But her eyes and lips—typical Northern eyes and lips—challenge her air of sheltered leisure. It would be hard to deceive those eyes—they are steady, shrewd and far-seeing; and one feels that the word that issues from those firm determined lips would be her bond.
It is the portrait of Miss Macnaughtan, who gave the last two years of her life, from July 1914 to September 1916, to suffering humanity, and died as the result of the hardships she endured.
There were women whom nobody had ever ‘wanted,’ young women who longed to put their untried strength to the test, women who never kindled except at the sight of helplessness and suffering, vain women whose one desire was to be important, and unimaginative women who craved a sporting adventure—for all of them the war unlocked the gates of Life, and they entered in and breathed the richer air and were content at last.
How different was Miss Macnaughtan’s case! She was one of those admirable single Englishwomen whose lives seem strangely fulfilled and complete. She had a home she loved, many friends, leisure for her work, a feeling for life that was a passion, and an immense capacity for happiness. But the war came to her, locking the gates of Life. ‘I think something in me has stood still or died,’ she confessed.
Except for a few family letters, her experiences in [12] Belgium, North France, Russia, and on the Persian front are written in the form of a diary. But though one feels that her deliberate aim was to set down faithfully what she saw—the result is infinitely more than that. It is a revelation of her inner self which would perhaps never have been revealed in times less terrible and strange. For though her desire for expression was imperative and throughout the book there are signs of the writer’s ‘literary’ longing to register the moment, the glimpse, the scene, it is evident that she had no wish to let her reserved, fastidious personality show through. It happened in spite of her, and there she is for all time, elderly, frail, with her terrible capacity for suffering, her love for humanity, her pride in being ‘English,’ and her burning zeal to sacrifice herself for those who are broken; not because of their weakness, but because they have been strong. Perhaps above all things she loves the Northern courage, not only to endure, but to hide suffering behind a bright shield. But the war makes her cry:
It isn’t right. This damage to human life is horrible. It is madness to slaughter these thousands of young men. Almost at last, in a rage, one feels inclined to cry out against the sheer imbecility of it. The pain of it is all too much. I am sick of seeing suffering.
And:
… Above all, one feels—at least I do—that one is always, and quite palpably, in the shadow of the death of youth—beautiful youth, happy and healthy and free. Always I seem to see the white faces of boys turned up to the sky, and I hear their cries and see the agony which youth was never meant to bear. They are too young for it, far too young; but they lie out on the field … and bite the mud in their frenzy of pain; and they call for their mothers and no one comes…. Who can listen to a boy’s groans and his shrieks of pain? This is war.
Again:
A million more men are needed—thus the fools [13] called men talk. But youth looks up with haggard eyes, and youth, grown old, knows that Death alone is merciful.
As one reads on one becomes more and more aware how unfitted by nature Miss Macnaughtan was for the great part which she accepted and played so magnificently. Nothing short of rude youth could have stood the wet and cold, lack of sleep, horrible food, agonizing discomfort at the little railway station where she chopped up vegetables for soup, journeys that (only to read of) are a torment. But she was always ill; she loathed communal life with its meanness, pettiness, scandal and muddling untidiness. How can people behave like this—at such a time? she seems to cry. And little by little her weariness turns to disgust and she cannot bear it. She sorrowfully turns aside—all her love goes out to suffering youth. Nothing else matters.
I wish I could give my life for some boy who would like to live very much, and to whom all things are joyous. But alas! one can’t swop lives like this….
When she writes that, she is dying. Her journal ends with the words:
I should like to have left the party—quitted the feast of life—when all was gay and amusing. I should have been sorry to come away, but it would have been far better than being left till all the lights are out. I could have said truly to the Giver of the feast, ‘Thanks for an excellent time.’ But now so many of the guests have left, and the fires are going out, and I am tired.
What is heroism? There was a time when one had the easy belief that heroes and heroines were a radiant few who were born brave, and the reason why they did not shrink or turn aside from their lonely, perilous path was that they were blind to the shado ws. They had lifted their eyes; they had seen their star, and their joyful feet ran in the light of it to some high, mysterious triumph.
[14] But our silver heroes and heroines glitter no longer. Gone is that shining band of knights and ladies. We know better, turning aside from their lifeless perfections as ‘bad’ children do from a ‘good’ fairy book that has all the old stories, but with the wolves and witches and wicked giants left out. We have learned that the final sticking of the dragon counts for almost nothing; it is in the righting that has gone before against Fear and his shadowy army, against the dark hosts of Imagination and the blacker hosts of Reality, that true heroes and heroines are discovered. They are not born brave, and perhaps the burning star is not other than their own spirit, bright and solitary in the incomprehensible darkness of their being. For common men there is a star that beckons; these chosen ones live by a light, yet they are not led.
(April 25, 1919.)
The Gay-Dombeys — By Sir Harry Johnston
It is not without a tinge of malicious satisfaction that we realize there are delights reserved for us elderly creatures which are quite out of sight, out of reach, of the golden boys and girls who are making so wonderfully free of our apples and pears and plums. Perhaps one of the rarest and most delicious is meeting with an old play-fellow who is just come from the country of our childhood, and having an endless talk with him about what is changed and what is the same—whether the Allens still live in the same house, what has become of the huge Molesworth family, and was the mystery of old Anderson ever solved?
We shall never see these people again; we shall share nothing more with them. We shall never push open their garden gates and smell our way past the flower bushes to the white verandahs where they sit gossiping in the velvet moonlight. Why should we feel then this passionate interest? Is it because, prisoners as we are, we love to feel [15] we have inhabited other lives—lived more lives than one—or we are reluctant to withdraw wholly because of that whispered word ‘Finis’ which locks the doors against us, one by one, for ever?
The memory of our childhood is like ‘the memory of a tale that is told,’ and the delight of talking over with a boon companion a book you have read in the long ago is hardly less real. It is not very different; you are both left wondering. What happened ‘after that’? Does the author know? Or does he—wonder too? What would Dickens say if he read Sir Harry Johnston’s ‘Gay-Dombeys,’ which continues the history of the Dombey family and their circle through the Victorian period and into our own times, with wonderful elaborateness and excursions and allusions such as their author loved, and with a canvas so crowded that you have to stand on tiptoe and look over people’s shoulders and under their arms and round them before you can be perfectly sure that you have seen everybody who is there?
We can think of no other author who took a final farewell of his characters with greater reluctance than did Dickens. His meanest villains were, after all, citizens of his world, and as such they stumbled and were up again, to be nearly caught, and again escaped before he could bear to let them go for ever. As to those whom he loved—and in whom he lived—it was anguish to him to submit to their passing. ‘Shall I never be that dying boy again, waving my hand at the water on the wall? Never be again the child-wife, Little Blossom, asking if my poor boy is very lonely downstairs?’ And so the boat puts back once more for one last sob, one last gush of tears. Even the survivors were not allowed to gather without one final Grand Tableau before the fall of the curtain, which is intended for an abiding proof for him and for us that they are still there, still going on, still extravagantly, abundantly alive. It is this extraordinary delight in the exuberance of life, in its endless possibilities of such complications and combinations, that Sir Harry Johnston shares with Dickens. We [16] are inclined to believe that his fantastic choice of characters is due to his recognition of Dickens as a fellow passionate explorer, with London for a dark continent, and surely as strange a collection of animals as could be discovered in any jungle to wonder at, to watch, and to track to their lairs. It is certain that they both have the peculiarly English gift (which foreigners call our ‘indifference’) of accepting the strange thing in all its strangeness, presenting it with all the freakish detail left in, and of being ‘at home’ anywhere they may choose to feel ‘at home.’
But the author of ‘The Gay-Dombeys’ is far too much the born writer to put on the manner of the author of ‘Dombey and Son.’ To be carried away by him in the good old-fashioned style that your modern writer would think shame to attempt, you must admit that the Dickens world existed as part of the real world, and there is no reason why Mr. Arthur Balfour should not discuss theology with Mrs. Humphry Ward at one of Florence Gay-Dombey’s parties in her Morris drawing-room in Onslow Square. Why not? And is not Sir Harry Johnston justified in portraying real personalities of the period by the fact that, for the reader, they are never quite so convincing as the unreal. Indeed, there comes ever a moment in the life of your confirmed reader when he catches himself murmuring: ‘Who shall say which is which …?’ This novel is full of such moments. Nevertheless, it is no hunting-ground for scandalmongers; they may stand up to the canvas as close as they like; the style of the painting is too large, too happy, and too free to feed the prying eye.
It would be difficult to tell the story, for the story is made up of stories, each as separate as flowers on a tree, and all contributing to the delightful effect. One pauses, wondering which to gather; but no—they make so satisfactory a whole that it were useless to attempt to choose. Perhaps the finest bloom is Lady Feenix’s friendship with Eustace Morven. But that is because she [17] is such an adorable woman—and adorable women are still a little painfully rare.
(May 2, 1919.)
The Moon and Sixpence — By W. S. Maugham
Had Mr. Maugham confessed to his hero Charles Strickland, a painter of genius, his great desire to present him, to explain him to the public, with all his eccentricities, violences and odious ways included, we imagine the genius would have retorted in his sardonic way: ‘Go to hell. Let them look at my pictures or not look at them—damn them. My painting is all there is to me.’ This discouraging reply is not without a large grain of truth. Strickland cut himself off from the body of life, clumsily, obstinately, savagely—hacking away, regardless of torn flesh and quivering nerves, like some old Maori warrior separating himself from a shattered limb with a piece of sharp shell. What proof have we that he suffered? No proof at all. On the contrary, each fresh ugly blow wrung a grin or chuckle from him, but never the slightest sign that he would have had it otherwise if he could.
If we had his pictures before us, or the memory of them in our mind’s eye, this his state of mind might be extremely illuminating, but without them, with nothing to reinforce our knowledge of him but a description of two or three which might apply equally well to a very large number of modern works, we are left strangely unsatisfied. The more so in that Mr. Maugham takes extraordinary pains in explaining to us that Strickland is no imaginary character. His paintings are known everywhere, everywhere acclaimed. Books have been written about him in English and French and German. He even goes so far as to give us the author’s and the publishers’ names—well-known live publishers who would surely never allow their names to be taken in vain. So it comes to this. If [18] Strickland is a real man and this book a sort of guide to his works, it has its value; but if Mr. Maugham is merely pulling our critical leg it will not do. Then, we are not told enough. We must be shown something of the workings of his mind; we must have some comment of his upon what he feels, fuller and more exhaustive than his perpetual: ‘Go to hell.’ It is simply essential that there should be some quality in him revealed to us that we may love, something that will stop us for ever from crying: ‘If you have to be so odious before you can paint bananas—pray leave them unpainted.’
Here are the facts. Charles Strickland, a middle-aged stockbroker, the husband of a charming cultured woman and the father of two typically nice English children, suddenly, on a day, without a hint of warning, leaves his home and business and goes off to Paris to paint. The reason is unthinkable. A sturdy, ruddy middle-aged man cannot so utterly change his nature. He can; he does. Living in poverty, great untidiness and discomfort, he renounces his old life and seemingly never gives it another thought. For the moment he sheds that respectable envelope and is away, it is no longer part of his new self. He is grown out of its roundness and firmness and is become a lean pale creature with a great red beard, a hooked nose and thick sensual lips, possessed with one passion, ravaged by one desire—to paint great pictures. Paris he accepts as though he had always known it. He lives the life of its disreputable quarters as though he had been brought up in them and adopts its ugly ways with a kind of fiendish glee. Then he is discovered, half dead of a fever, by a stupid kind-hearted little Dutchman who takes him into his flat and nurses him. The adored gentle wife of the Dutchman falls under Strickland’s spell and ruins her life for him. When he is sick of her (for his contempt for women is fathomless) she takes poison and dies. And Strickland, his sexual appetite satisfied, ‘smiles dryly and pulls his beard.’
Finally, he leaves Paris and makes his home in Tahiti. [19] Here he goes native, living in a remote hut with a black woman and her relatives, and painting masterpieces until his body takes its great and final revenge upon his spirit and he becomes a leper. He lives for years, painting the walls of his house. When he is dying he makes his black wife promise to burn the house down so that the pictures may be destroyed. ‘His life was complete. He had made a world and saw that it was good. Then, in pride and contempt, he destroyed it.’
This strange story is related by a friend of Mrs. Strickland’s, a young, rather priggish author, who is sent over to Paris after the first tragedy to discover with whom Strickland has eloped and whether he can be induced to return.
‘You won’t go back to your wife?’ I said at last.
‘Never.’
‘… She’ll never make you a single reproach.’
‘She can go to hell.’
‘You don’t care if people think you an utter black-guard? You don’t care if she and her children have to beg their bread?’
‘Not a damn.’
That is very typical of their conversations together. Indeed, the young man confesses that if Strickland is a great deal more articulate than that, he has put the words into his mouth—divined them from his gestures. ‘From his own conversation I was able to glean nothing.’ And ‘his real life consisted of dreams and of tremendously hard work.’ But where are the dreams? Strickland gives no hint of them; the young man makes no attempt to divine them. ‘He asked nothing from his fellows except that they should leave him alone. He was single-hearted in his aim, and to pursue it he was willing to sacrifice not only himself—many can do that—but others….’ But what does the sacrifice matter if you do not care a rap whether the creature on the altar is a little horned ram or your only beloved son?
[20] The one outstanding quality in Strickland’s nature seems to have been his contempt for life and the ways of life. But contempt for life is not to be confused with liberty, nor can the man whose weapon it is fight a tragic battle or die a tragic death. If to be a great artist were to push over everything that comes in one’s way, topple over the table, lunge out right and left like a drunken man in a café and send the pots flying, then Strickland was a great artist. But great artists are not drunken men; they are men who are divinely sober. They know that the moon can never be bought for sixpence, and that liberty is only a profound realization of the greatness of the dangers in their midst.
(May 9, 1919.)
Loose Ends — By Arnold Lunn
In attempting to make a novel out of his ideas on public school education, Mr. Lunn has set himself a peculiarly difficult task. This is, chiefly, because he knows his subject so well from the point of view of the boy as well as that of the master, and his sympathies are so nicely divided between them that he is unsatisfied if he does not convey both. He succeeds, but his success breaks his book into halves, and we cannot quite see how it can fail to have the same effect upon his public.
Who but little boys could take a lively interest in the play and chatter of little men of thirteen upwards, could exult in the way they routed old Slimy:
Phillips looked Slimy up and down. He gazed at his hair, his face and his feet.
‘Slimy dear,’ he said with deliberate and cold-blooded contempt, ‘you smell. Your feet stink. We don’t want you. Get out, and leave the door open behind you to air the room….’
—could burn with indignation at the rotten shame it was [21] that old Tom didn’t get his colours and Burton did, could relish to the full the exquisite joke of bringing the Museum baboon into the class-room of the short-sighted master, or could squeeze the last drop of enjoyment from:
Jack’s cricket was meteoric. He was a fast but indifferent bowler, a brilliant but not very reliable bat. The local yeomen who watched the school matches from behind the palings greeted his boundaries with full-throated enthusiasm, and his ‘ducks’ with noisy grief. No member of the school side could score so rapidly as Jack when he was in form, and none were more subjected to periodic runs of bad luck.
But the roaring conversations, debates and sets-to between ‘unconventional’ masters, whose pipes are always going out and who have a way of signifying their pleasure or displeasure by ‘inarticulate noises,’ would leave the juvenile reader dreadfully cold. And the vague sad fears of gentle, thoughtful Mother Helen that her boy is hers no longer—not wholly hers (can she win him back by taking a house on the river for his summer ‘hols’ and reading Swinburne to him in the punt?)—would leave him, if possible, colder still.
We are put to it to imagine whom these situations would warm and vivify, especially the former one—the young schoolmaster, rampant, in the old traditional school. What original fire it had has kindled many torches of late; it would need a powerful breath to blow the flame clear and shining again. Beautiful, gentle Helen, mother of the hero, in spite of the fact that she reads Mr. Masefield and has her very own opinion of Dickens and Mr. Arnold Bennett, is never more than a shadow. Were the light to fall upon her one instant, she would be gone.
The book opens with a discourse by the author upon ‘that most obstinately English of English families—the Chattel Leighs. It is typical of the family that they have never hyphened their double name and never dropped the Chattel.’ Conscientious, hard-headed, reserved and [22] discreet, they are chosen for the hero’s ancestors on the paternal side. Philip Chattel Leigh, father of Maurice, is indeed an astonishing reproduction of a Royal Academy portrait of an English gentleman. He is complete even to the little scene in the consulting room of the ‘eminent specialist,’ where he receives his sentence of death.
‘I think the end will be sudden, perhaps almost painless.’
Philip pulled out his notebook. ‘I’ll jot down a note or two,’ he said calmly, ‘it’s as well to make no mistake. Possibly two years, six months probably. Let’s see, what about smoking? …’
‘Yes, smoke by all means in moderation.’
Philip rose briskly. ‘Well, Sir Horace, thank you for your sympathy. I know your time is valuable. The trees are coming out nicely, aren’t they?’
His wife, daughter of a bookish father, ‘led a life of restrained happiness and entertained his friends with that tranquil serenity that was her most distinctive charm.’ But she kept ‘the intangible life of books’ away from her husband, and when he returned from his work she ‘listened patiently but with intelligence.’
They have two sons. Tom, the elder, is his father over again, but Maurice is cast in another mould.
He clung to his mother, appealed to her for sympathy, thought aloud when he was with her, and gave to Helen that unique joy that belongs to those who know they have the power of shaping and moulding a human soul.
Her ‘unique joy’ is short-lived. At eight years of age he goes off to a ‘Priver’; at thirteen he joins Tom at Horn-borough and becomes a public school man. What is the effect of the Public School system upon a boy who ‘worships at the shrine of physical fitness,’ and yet has ‘discovered that poetry not only unlocks new aspects of beauty, but that it serves as a key to those forgotten chambers of the soul where beauty once perceived … [23] slumbers till the magic numbers waken her to life once more’? For the purposes of his experiment, Mr. Lunn selects two friends for him—Jack Spence, who stands for the life of the body and whose batting thrills him to the bone, and Quirk, the revolutionary schoolmaster, who makes Shakespeare live again and leads Maurice from Kipling to Conrad, higher still and higher.
We cannot see that it has any effect upon him at all. The Chattel Leigh in him makes him moderately good at games, and enthusiastic enough over ‘footer pots’; his mother’s literary tastes keep him from narrow-mindedness or from being feverishly interested in knowing what a concubine is. In fact, he comes out by the same door as in he went, with Jack still his friend, Quirk his master, and his mother waiting, hoping still.
Is Mr. Lunn administering a powder? But if the powder is to be disguised, surely it is not too much to ask that the jam should be really good jam—none of your familiar mixtures from a dreary pot, but some exquisite preserve of the author’s—black cherry, Frimley peach, sharp, sweet quince.
The dose is large; jam qua jam, alas! excites us no longer. We cannot help feeling that Mr. Lunn expects of us an innocence of appetite which is very rare.
(May 16, 1919.)
Pink Roses — By Gilbert Cannan
It seems that the curtain has hardly fallen upon his last appearance, but here is Mr. Cannan on the stage again. Again, with charming bravery he faces the lights, the music, the humming, hungry audience. What has he to offer? What new impersonation, what fresh, original ‘turn’? And are we to discover, behind him, a vast bounding landscape, very rich in light and shadow, or something gay, exquisite, dotted with bright colours like fruits, with just a line of sea to give him his far horizon? …
[24] Trevor Mathew, denied the Great Adventure because of a systolic murmur of the heart, ‘was beginning to think he was losing his sense of humour.’ ‘He sat down in a hard green garden chair.’ … ‘Fifteen yards away from him a girl was sitting’ … ‘her eyes were fixed on him’ … ‘her left eyelid drooped, and she gave an inviting jerk of the head’ … ‘Never in his life had Trevor spoken to an unknown lady.’ ‘Their chairs had been fifteen yards apart. He kept exactly’ (note that: as Dostoevsky would have said) ‘fifteen yards behind her. As she reached Hyde Park Corner she stopped. He stopped, too, fifteen yards behind her.’ And so into the Café Claribel, where he sat at a table ‘fifteen yards away.’
It is surely evident from this remarkable opening, with its ever so simple refrain of ‘Fifteen yards away,’ that our expert performer is grown ambitious of attracting the sympathies of a larger, simpler audience than was his formerly. But we must go carefully; there may be more in this than meets the astonished eye.
How friendly her smile was! How charming to be in sympathy with another human being fifteen yards away. He did not wish it to be any nearer, nor did he desire the adventure to proceed any further. On the other hand he would not have it come to an end. As it was it had in it an exquisite quality of happiness, of fulfilment, of poignancy—just a hint. He did not require more.
Let us be just to Mr. Cannan. If this exact measurement can convey happiness, fulfilment, just a hint of poignancy even, he cannot have marked it off so lightly. These be no common garden fifteen yards. May they not be the shy beginnings of a courtship between Science and Literature—the measuring of fifteen yards of soul? …
Our tentative question is almost answered on the very next page: ‘I never thought I should be happy again.’ It seemed to him that ‘he was wronging his friends to be made happy by such a little thing as the scent and [25] sweetness of a nosegay of fresh roses’… How far away? Come, we all know it by this time. Now ladies and gentlemen, please, once more, and all together, ‘fifteen yards away.’
This new sense in our hero makes us eager for a fuller description of him…. ‘As he had an ample allowance the rise in prices did not affect him at all, and he remained untouched, always perfectly dressed and careful to eat in the atmosphere to which he was accustomed…. It was not that he did not notice shabbiness. He did, especially in boots, but he put it down to slovenliness. He was an only son.’
Here, again, you observe, the apparently innocent statement is broken in upon very strangely by the ‘especially in boots,’ and the sudden hammer-like stroke, ‘he was an only son.’ Did the boots also have to be a certain distance away before—but to return to our Pink Roses.
Trevor did not see the lady again until one evening outside the café, when he bought a pup, ‘fortunately a male,’ from an old man. She was standing by, and the innocent creature broke the ice between them; in two minutes he was in her flat and telling her, ‘I wanted to stay at Cambridge. I could easily have got a Fellowship. I did History in my first two years and got a First. I wanted to go on with it, but my governor insisted on my taking Law. I got a First in that, too, but there isn’t much Law in practising. I mean it isn’t often you get a legal point…. Her lips were parted, her eyes shone, her bosom rose and fell.’ Until, ‘suddenly in Trevor there came tumbling in a series of swift painful realizations that this evening was somehow very important, and that it was what he had been waiting for through the weary months of almost catalepsy. It was his chance to assert himself, to break his arranged life that was left untouched when all other arranged lives had been broken.’…
And thus, to heal his hurt, to make him forget his too [26] infinitely cherished friends whom the war had broken, that he might be ‘disturbed out of the nauseated lethargy in which his grief had left him’ and ‘have something working in his soul to withstand the corrosion of the war,’ excusing himself ‘on the ground that it was better for his mother to have him restored to some kind of sanity, than reduced to a frozen and insensible imbecility by the mental strain which was as bad, if not worse, than the physical strain of the trenches,’ the brilliant, captivating young Cambridge man decides to allow the frail but doting lady to love him for one whole year. Why not? ‘She was so completely, even abjectly, his, as to give him an indomitable sense of possession. She was as much his as the pup …’ And Mr. Cannan is sure enough of himself to cry for his hero, ‘After that the deluge.’
But not even the sure hand of our author can make a whole satisfying meal of such an intimacy, complete with its trip to Brighton and pink satin bedroom bows, enriched by a coloured maid, a magnificent motor-car, a black chauffeur, and two comic Jews. Let us hasten to assure the reader that other meats are provided; the table veritably groans under hearty English fare. Here is the lawyer’s office, dusty, traditional, with its pompous old chief and the case that never is settled; here the rosy-cheeked, silver-haired mother who trusts her boy; here the girl whose grey eyes ‘cannot but look direct,’ and who is to have what is left of Trevor after the Lady of the Roses has taught him all there is to know about women; here is the foolish old inventor in his ‘tattered and stained dressing-gown,’ whose explosions blow off ‘one eyebrow’; and everywhere there are large slabs of war-time conversation for ravenous youth to munch between the courses. None but the dainty or the rich need go empty away.
Surely it is a little pity that the very unpleasant subject of the war should find a place in all this plenty. Need we be told of these twinges of indigestion suffered by our hero as he takes a bite of now this—now that? They are [27] never more than slight twinges, never serious pangs, and as often as not cured by a chuckle. But their effect is, somehow, disastrous upon the fragile, fast-fading flowers behind which Mr. Cannan has chosen to make his bow.
(May 23, 1919.)
The Young Visiters or Mr. Salteena’s Plan — By Daisy Ashford
This is the story of Mr. Salteena’s plan to become a real gentleman (‘I am quite alright as they say but I would like to be the real thing can it be done he added slapping his knees …’), of his unrequited love for fair and flighty Ethel Monticue, of Bernard Clark’s dashing and successful wooing of Ethel, together with some very rich, costly pictures of High Socierty, a levie at Buckingham Palace, a description of the Compartments at the Chrystal Palace occupied by Earls and Dukes, and a very surprising account of the goings on at the Gaierty Hotel. It is one of the most breathless novels we have ever read, for the entirely unmerciful and triumphant author seems to realize from the very first moment that she can do what she likes with us, and so we are flung into the dazzling air with Bernard and Ethel, and dashed to earth with poor Mr. Salteena, without the relief of one dull moment. Happily, there are only twelve chapters; for human flesh and blood could stand no more—at any rate grown-up human flesh and blood. For, as far as we can judge from the portrait of the nine-year-old author, this rate of living did not upset her in the least; she positively throve on it and could have sustained it for ever.
At first glance Daisy Ashford may appear very sophisticated. There is evidence that she thoroughly enjoyed the run of her parents’ library, and, unseen and unheard, revelled in the conversation of her elders. Signs are not wanting that she enjoyed exceptional opportunities for [28] looking through keyholes, peeping through half-open doors, gazing over the banisters at the group in the hall below, and sitting, squeezed and silent, between the grown-ups when they took the air in the ‘baroushe.’
But for all her dressing up in Ouida’s plumy hat and long skirt with a train, she remains a little child with a little child’s vision of her particular world. That she managed to write it down and make a whole round novel of it is a marvel almost too good to be true. But there it is, and even while the grown-up part of us is helpless with laughter we leap back with her into our nine-year-old self where the vision is completely real and satisfying.
Who among us à cet âge-là has not smiled through his fingers at Ethel Monticue, overheard at a party:
What plesand compartments you have cried Ethel in rarther a socierty tone.
Fairly so so responded the Earl do you live in London he added in a loud tone as someone was playing a very difficult peice on the piano.
Well no I dont said Ethel my home is really in Northumberland but I am at present stopping with Mr. Clark at the Gaierty Hotel she continued in a somewhat showing off tone.
Oh I see said the earl well shall I introduce you to a few of my friends.
Oh please do said Ethel with a dainty blow at her nose.
It has been questioned whether the book is not an elaborate hoax; but if one remembers the elaborate games one played at that age, the characters that were invented, the situations and scenes—games that continued for days and days, and were actually unwritten novels in their way—one finds no difficulty in believing in the amazing child. One only rushes to rejoice in her and to advise our old young men when they approach the more solemn parts of their serious adventures to take a dip into her ‘plan’ and see how it should be done.
(May 30, 1919.)
[29] Heritage — By V. Sackville West
On page 3 of her novel Miss Sackville West makes an interesting comment:
I should like to explain here that those who look for facts and events as the central points of significance in a tale will be disappointed. On the other hand I may fall upon an audience which, like myself, contends that the vitality of human beings is to be judged less by their achievement than by their endeavour, by the force of their emotion rather than by their success.
These are not extraordinary words; but we are inclined to think they contain the reason for the author’s failure to make important a book which has many admirable qualities.
If we are not to look for facts and events in a novel—and why should we?—we must be very sure of finding those central points of significance transferred to the endeavours and emotions of the human beings portrayed. For, having decided on the novel form, one cannot lightly throw one’s story over the mill without replacing it with another story which is, in its way, obedient to the rules of that discarded one. There must be the same setting out upon a voyage of discovery (but through unknown seas instead of charted waters), the same difficulties and dangers must be encountered, and there must be an ever-increasing sense of the greatness of the adventure and an ever more passionate desire to possess and explore the mysterious country. There must be given the crisis when the great final attempt is made which succeeds—or does not succeed. Who shall say?
The crisis, then, is the chief of our ‘central points of significance’ and the endeavours and the emotions are stages on our journey towards or away from it. For [30] without it, the form of the novel, as we see it, is lost. Without it, how are we to appreciate the importance of one ‘spiritual event’ rather than another? What is to prevent each being unrelated—complete in itself—if the gradual unfolding in growing, gaining light is not to be followed by one blazing moment?
We may look in vain for such a moment in ‘Heritage.’ It abounds in points of significance, but there is no central point. After an excellent first chapter—an excellent approach—we begin almost immediately to feel that the author, in dividing her story as she does between two tellers, has let it escape from her control. And as one reads on the feeling becomes more and more urgent: there is nobody in control. Her fine deliberate style is, as it were, wilfully abused by the two tellers; they use it to prove much that is irrelevant; they make it an excuse for lingering and turning aside when everything was to be gained by going forward—until finally, between them they break the book into pieces, not harshly or madly, but by a kind of delicate, persistent tugging, until there is a piece of Sussex, a fragment of Italy, some letters from the war, a long episode in Ephesus, fine, light, glowing pieces—each one, if we examine closely, a complete little design in itself.
The first teller is Malory, a wandering inconsistent man who loves to stand aside and see what people make of this dark business, life. Seated on a hillside in Italy, he relates to a half acquaintance, half friend, a strange experience he had while living in a farmer’s household in Kent. His first vision of the Penniston family as he stands on the threshold watching them at meat, is beautifully conveyed; one shares his ‘thrill of excitement’ and his consciousness that there was something strange here—something that wasn’t at all in keeping with sober English farm folk. Little by little he discovers what it is. That tiny aged great-grandmother, crouched over the fire, roasting chestnuts, wrapping herself in the warmth and the faint foreign smell of the burnt nuts was a Spanish dancer.
[31] The wild warm blood glows again in her great-granddaughter, Ruth, and in Ruth’s cousin, Rawdon Westim-cott. In Rawdon it runs pure and dark, but there is that in Ruth which rebels; she appeals to Malory to save her—and feeling that Malory is her saviour she loves him, but he is blind until it is too late.
Thus Malory. And now the story is taken up by the man who listened. More than a year has passed; the war is raging. He is in England, discharged from hospital, and he decides to visit the Pennistons and see for himself what has happened. He goes, and realising the deep misery of Ruth in the clutches of her brutal husband, he longs for Westimcott’s death and that Ruth should marry Malory. But there is a spoiled tragedy. Rawdon is not killed when his wife shoots him. He masters her again.
The third part of the book is a journal sent by Malory to his friend, giving an account of the next ten years; how he returned from the war and asked Ruth to leave her husband, how when she refused he went on an expedition to North Africa and then to Ephesus. At Ephesus an entirely new character appears, a man named MacPherson, who has nothing whatever to do with the story, and, except that he receives a yearly packet of flower seeds from Ruth, Malory’s story becomes the story of his life with MacPherson. After the outsider’s death Malory returns to London where Ruth finds him and—takes him home. She explains (or rather he explains for her) that her wild husband has turned coward and left her. He, the bully, has been through all those ten years gradually filling with fear of her, until, at last, he can bear no more.
What has she done to provoke that fear? Ah, that would be interesting to know, but the author does not tell us. It happened and it freed her; and with his going from her the devil goes from her, too, leaving her at peace and free to lead her other life with Malory.
These are bare outlines, richly filled in by the author, and yet we are not ‘carried away.’ She has another comment:
[32] Little of any moment occurs in my story, yet behind it all I am aware of tremendous forces at work which none have rightly understood, neither the actors nor the onlookers.
That is easily said. We have heard it so often of late that we are grown a little suspicious, and almost believe that these are dangerous words for a writer to use. They are a dark shield in his hand when he ought to carry a bright weapon.
(May 30, 1919.)
Blind Alley — By W. L. George
There is a certain large shop in London where one may still enter in and worship at one’s will. The aisles are lofty; the lights dim; each little side chapel is a rich mysterious jewel. Here one may linger, stroking the languid velvet; staring at the embroideries that seem to come to ever richer, more intricate flowering the longer one looks; sighing over chiffons, soft as the shadows on sea water; gazing at the fruit-like cushions gathered from some giant’s orchard, and fainting by the way at last upon couches made to pillow the golden heads of millionaires…. The sound of the clocks is so sweet, one fancies from their chiming honey is distilled; walking among the huge solemn furniture one expects the air to be shaken by the roaring of a lion; the glass and the china still glitter as though fresh from a reluctant wave.
But it is very strange in the midst of all this to observe the character of one’s fellow-worshippers. They are, without exception, solid upper-middle-class English people, well nourished, easy in their behaviour, and indifferent, seeming to ignore, indeed, their fabulous surroundings. They are used to this kind of thing, born and bred in it. Why exclaim? Why give it one’s attention?
If we may judge from the latest novel of Mr. W. L. George the whole of England is glassed over, roofed over, [33] subdivided, as he sees it, into just such another magasin de luxe, through which he tiptoes, touching, tasting, positively gloating over not only the merchandise, but, with his eyes still a little dazzled by the Eastern glare, the upper-middle-class English people wandering through. It is the ensemble which fascinates him; this coolness and heat which he mixes together into a brew which is, to say the least, uncommonly exotic. For, if we are to believe ‘Blind Alley,’ the intactness of the upper-middle-class is all a superficial seeming; they are each and all of them capable of taking up a length of that filmy silk, binding it about their brows in turbans, or shrouding themselves in its veils and going out into the Tottenham Court Road to ride away upon camels. Picture a father, a retired banker, and now a country gentleman, an eminently practical man, hushing a quarrel with a rebellious daughter in this fashion:
Then Sylvia flung down the pen and stamped: ‘You’re all against me. You all want to kick me when I’m down. I hate you—I hate you.’
“So do I,” shouted Sir Hugh, and slammed the door behind him.
A few minutes later … he felt remorseful. So he sent by a messenger boy an enormous bunch of Parma violets and a note: ‘Sylvia dear, your father has the pride of age and the temper of youth. He asks pardon of his beautiful daughter, and hopes that, when next she comes to cheer his waning years, she will bring forgiveness in her eyes of amber.’
Does that touch and start quivering, in many an English daughter’s bosom, a familiar chord?
And here is a young husband, the owner of an aircraft works, musing in the garden of his country home, with his wife and lovely screaming children near by:
‘There is the truth of life,’ he thought. ‘To enjoy all that is easily graceful. The sight of lovely women, yet not the stress of loving them; pictures and books, [34] yet not the agony of trying to achieve art; little children that come up as flowers, to get older, to get fat, to get bald, and still to know how to smile.’
It is hard to see his gentleman without a fan and a sash and a little short dagger. And yet but a moment before, thinking over his loves, he had ‘sneered at himself’ … ‘Frank, old fellow, you’ve pitched on a rotten hobby. Why don’t you go in for gardening?’ Which is as difficult to reconcile with his Oriental self as the political father’s joke with his other daughter who asked him why the spring, my dear, was no longer spring. Sir Hugh laughed. ‘Ah yes, those were the days of spring onions; these are the days of spring offensives.’
Perhaps from these extracts the reader may gather that, whatever else Mr. George’s long strong book may be, it is not dull. It opens on January 9, 1916, and it closes with the January of this year. It is, therefore, yet another revue of England in war-time, but produced by an expert and conscientious manager who is determined that no scene, situation, character, phrase, catchword or fashion shall be left without a rôle and a name in the packed souvenir programme. The chief parts are sustained by Sir Hugh Oakley, his wife and three grown-up children, each one, as it were, a specimen of his or her kind, and all of them, grouped together, forming what Mr. George doubtless considers ‘the representative English family.’ The dominating member is Sir Hugh, with his ‘high, boney, beak-like nose which had been set as a brand upon the face of nearly every male Oakley’ [discriminating Providence!] ‘for the last two centuries.’ Next in importance comes Monica, a slim unawakened girl whose experiences in a T.N.T. factory are, we gravely hope, more explosive than was usual. She and the manager of the works are the lovers of the piece. ‘Most exquisite, most adorable, copper-crowned lily … this is the key of the place they call Bull’s Field.’ When she let herself in she noticed ‘a small shanty on wheels, on the walls of which was painted: [35] Foreman’s Office…. The window opened and Cotten-ham looked out at her. He did not smile nor sign to her to come, but so remained….’ Cottenham indeed? Does one not expect rather at such a time and place—Mr. Wilkie Bard?
Monica’s sister, Sylvia, is the woman floating on the dark swollen flood from the embrace of one man into the arms of another and another. Then there is Stephen, the wounded son, whose nose repeats his father’s, and whose arguments repeat his nose, being singularly high, boney and beak-like. And lastly the mother, a very handsome woman with thick dark-red hair and ‘sherry-bright’ eyes who is impelled to decisive assertions….
They are to be found living through this tremendous interval in the Country House Department, which is incredibly complete, down to a butler carving the joint at the ‘tortured marble-topped Louis XV. table,’ and the old, all-too-old collie dozing in front of the logs in the hall. The completeness, however, is but symptomatic of Mr. George’s method. It persists in scenes from country life, scenes in a bar parlour, before a military tribunal, at a flag day in the Berkeley Hotel. These are all ‘models’ of their kind, with not a detail missing and only unfamiliar because of that curious strong scent from the Oriental Department, permeating everything.
The prologue and the epilogue are sung by an orange-coloured Persian cat with eyes of watered agate—Kallikrates his name. He enters, on the alert, suspicious, but finding himself alone in the hall with the human beings safely away behind closed doors, he subsides, folds the ‘velvet gauntlets of his paws,’ composes his squat head into the sumptuous silk of his ruff, and begins to purr…. If we may say so without disrespect, we can almost hear the author joining in.
(June 6, 1919.)
[36] Kew Gardens — By Virginia Woolf
If it were not a matter to sigh over, it would be almost amusing to remember how short a time has passed since Samuel Butler advised the budding author to keep a notebook. What would be the author’s reply to such a counsel nowadays but an amused smile: ‘I keep nothing else!’ True; but if we remember rightly, Samuel Butler goes a little further; he suggests that the notebook should be kept in the pocket, and that is what the budding author finds intolerably hard. Up till now he has been so busy growing and blowing that his masterpieces still are unwritten, but there are the public waiting, gaping. Hasn’t he anything to offer before they wander elsewhere? Can’t he startle their attention by sheer roughness and crudeness and general slapdashery? Out comes the note-book, and the deed is done. And since they find its contents absolutely thrilling and satisfying, is it to be wondered at that the risk of producing anything bigger, more solid, and more positive—is not taken? The note-books of young writers are their laurels; they prefer to rest on them. It is here that one begins to sigh, for it is here that the young author begins to swell and to demand that, since he has chosen to make his note-books his All, they shall be regarded as of the first importance, read with a deadly seriousness and acclaimed as a kind of new Art—the art of not taking pains, of never wondering why it was one fell in love with this or that, but contenting oneself with the public’s dreary interest in promiscuity.
Perhaps that is why one feels that Mrs. Virginia Woolf’s story belongs to another age. It is so far removed from the note-book literature of our day, so exquisite an example of love at second sight. She begins where the others leave off, entering Kew Gardens, as it were, alone and at her leisure when their little first screams of excitement [37] have died away and they have rushed afield to some new brilliant joy. It is strange how conscious one is, from the first paragraph, of this sense of leisure: her story is bathed in it as if it were a light, still and lovely, heightening the importance of everything, and filling all that is within her vision with that vivid, disturbing beauty that haunts the air the last moment before sunset or the first moment after dawn. Poise—yes, poise. Anything may happen; her world is on tiptoe.
This is her theme. In Kew Gardens there was a flowerbed full of red and blue and yellow flowers. Through the hot July afternoon men and women ‘straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed,’ paused for a moment, were ‘caught’ in its dazzling net, and then moved on again and were lost. The mysterious intricate life of the flower-bed goes on untouched by these odd creatures. A little wind moves, stirring the petals so that their colours shake on to the brown earth, grey of a pebble, shell of a snail, a raindrop, a leaf, and for a moment the secret life is half-revealed; then a wind blows again, and the colours flash in the air and there are only leaves and flowers….
It happens so often—or so seldom—in life, as we move among the trees, up and down the known and unknown paths, across the lawns and into the shade and out again, that something—for no reason that we can discover—gives us pause. Why is it that, thinking back upon that July afternoon, we see so distinctly that flower-bed? We must have passed myriads of flowers that day; why do these particular ones return? It is true, we stopped in front of them, and talked a little and then moved on. But, though we weren’t conscious of it at the time, something was happening—something….
But it would seem that the author, with her wise smile, is as indifferent as the flowers to these odd creatures and their ways. The tiny rich minute life of a snail—how she [38] describes it! the angular high-stepping green insect—how passionate is her concern for him! Fascinated and credulous, we believe these things are all her concern until suddenly with a gesture she shows us the flower-bed, growing, expanding in the heat and light, filling a whole world.
(June 13, 1919.)
Java Head — By Joseph Hergesheimer
Those who have spent any portion of their life in a seaport town will remember a peculiar quality of light, which is to be observed there and in no other surroundings. For when the sun is over the sea and the waves high a trembling brilliance flashes over the town, now illuminating this part, now that. In its erratic hovering behaviour it might be likened to that imp of light children love to call Jack-on-the-wall; one can never tell where it may next appear. It is, and something is caught in it, dazzling fine, and then it is gone to be back again for another glittering moment—but almost before one has time to look it is flown away. Brilliant light, but not deep light, not a steady shining—a light by which one can register the moment but not discover and explore it.
For the writing of his novel, ‘Java Head,’ Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer would seem to have pointed his compass to this unfixed star and the result is an exciting but not a satisfying book. The scene, the personages and the drama—they are all separate, one from another, and as one story unfolds itself we have the sense that while the author applies himself to one he forgets the other two. They are dropped from him and from us until he chooses to revive them, to bring them into the light again.
The scene is Salem, at the time when it was still rich with incoming and outgoing trade, with ships bound for the East Indies and China and returning laden with [39] fabulous cargoes. But for all the author’s inside information and professional way in handling a ship, we are never quite sure that the sea is real sea or that these curious perfumed chests and jars are really full. While we read we are fascinated, but our fascination is conscious and almost assumed, as at a spectacle—something arranged and specially ‘set’ for a performance.
The personages are old Jeremy Ammidon, head of the firm of Ammidon, Ammidon and Saltanstone, his son William, William’s wife and their family of half-grown daughters. There is another son Gerrit, captain of the ‘Nautilus’ and hero of the book, whose ship is long overdue, and the early chapters full of the growing anxiety of the household at Java Head for his return are, to our thinking, the most successful. Here, at least, it is hardly possible to avoid a sense of progression, and the members of the family, gathered together under the shadowy wing of disaster are more nearly seen in relation to one another. Obvious as it is, and again more than a little theatrical, it is enough to lead us on in the hope that when the moment of relief comes and the ship is sighted, the scene, the personages and the drama will—not lose their separateness—but become part of one springing arch of light, their colours banded together as in a rainbow. This does not happen. For though Gerrit is seen on the deck, on the wharf, greeting his family, he never comes home at all. It is a wooden sailor who leads his high-born Manchu wife through the doors of Java Head, and however greatly Mr. Hergesheimer may insist upon Gerrit’s heroic qualities wooden he remains. We are told that he loved the Manchu lady. She was pining away, like some fabulous exquisite bird in a cage in Shanghai until he rescued her and brought her into a bigger cage, with heavier bolts and clumsier bars, and stupid unpainted faces to stare through and wonder at her. Her appearance, her clothes, her appointments, they are game indeed for the greedy light to play with, but, absorbed in them, it penetrates no further than to give us just a glimpse of [40] her superhuman calm, of the tragedy it was for her that this calm should be broken by Edward Dunsack, a low wretch whose mind has been poisoned by opium and who realises in his fiendish dreaming way how she suffers.
By the bedside of Dunsack’s niece, whom Gerrit has always loved, she commits suicide, and on the light flickers and dances, over another love affair, over the town, on to the niece, on to Gerrit’s ship waiting for him in the harbour, until finally it shows us Gerrit married to his old love and again putting out to sea.
It is not enough to be comforted with colours, to finger bright shawls, to watch the fireworks, to wonder what those strange men are shouting down at the wharves and to wander with the Ammidon family through the rooms of Java House. We are excited; our curiosity is roused as to what lies beneath these strange rich surfaces. Mr. Hergesheimer leaves us wondering and unsatisfied.
(June 13, 1919.)
Mary Olivier: A Life — By May Sinclair
There has been discovered, of late, cropping up among our established trees and flowers a remarkable plant, which, while immensely engaging our attention, has not hitherto attained a size and blooming sufficient to satisfy our desire to comprehend it. Little tight buds, half-open flowers that open no further, a blossom or two more or less out—these the plant has yielded. But here at last, with ‘Mary Olivier’ Miss Sinclair has given into our grateful hands a full fine specimen.
Is this, we wonder, turning over its three hundred and sixty-eight pages, to be the novel of the future? And if so, whence has it sprung? Who are its ancestors, its parents, its relations, its distant connections even? But the longer we consider it the more it appears to us as a very orphan of orphans, lying in a basket on the threshold of literature with a note pinned on its chest saying: ‘If I [41] am to be taken in and welcomed, then the whole rest of the family must be thrown out of the window.’ That they cannot exist together seems to us very plain. For the difference between the new way of writing and the old way is not a difference of degree but of kind. Its aim, as we understand it, is to represent things and persons as separate, as distinct, as apart as possible. Here, if you like, are the animals set up on the floor, the dove so different from the camel, the sheep so much bigger than the tiger. But where is the Ark? And where, even at the back of the mind, is the Flood, that dark mass of tumbling water which must sooner or later receive them, and float them or drown them? The Ark and the Flood belong to the old order, they are gone. In their place we have the author asking with indefatigable curiosity: ‘What is the effect of this animal upon me, or this or the other one?’
But if the Flood, the sky, the rainbow, or what Blake beautifully calls the bounding outline, be removed and if, further, no one thing is to be related to another thing, we do not see what is to prevent the whole of mankind turning author. Why should writers exist any longer as a class apart if their task ends with a minute description of a big or a little thing? If this is the be-all and end-all of literature why should not every man, woman and child write an autobiography and so provide reading matter for the ages? It is not difficult. There is no gulf to be bridged, no risk to be taken. If you do not throw your Papa and your Mamma against the heavens before beginning to write about them, his whiskers and her funny little nose will be quite important enough to write about, quite enough, reinforced with the pattern of the drawing-room carpet, the valse of the moment and the cook upstairs taking her hair out of pins, to make a whole great book. And as B’s papa’s whiskers and B’s mamma’s funny little nose are bound to be different again, and their effect upon B again different—why here is high entertainment forever!
[42] Entertainment. But the great writers of the past have not been ‘entertainers.’ They have been seekers, explorers, thinkers. It has been their aim to reveal a little of the mystery of life. Can one think for one moment of the mystery of life when one is at the mercy of surface impressions? Can one think when one is not only taking part but being snatched at, pulled about, flung here and there, cuffed and kissed, and played with? Is it not the great abiding satisfaction of a work of art that the writer was master of the situation when he wrote it and at the mercy of nothing less mysterious than a greater work of art?
It is too late in the day for this new form, and Miss Sinclair’s skilful handling of it serves but to make its failure the more apparent. She has divided her history of Mary Olivier into five periods, infancy, childhood, adolescence, maturity and middle-age, but these divisions are negligible. In the beginning Mary is two, but at the end she is still two—and forty-seven—and so it is throughout. At any moment, whatever her real age may be she is two—or forty-seven—either, both. At two (poor infant staggerer!) the vast barn of impressions opens upon her and life, with a pitchfork, tosses her out Mamma, Papa, Mark, Roddy, Dan, Jenny, Catty, Aunt Charlotte, Uncle Victor, and all the rest of them. At forty-seven, although in the meantime many of them have died and died disgustingly, she is still turning them over and over, still wondering whether any of them did happen to have in one of their ignoble pockets the happiness she has missed in life…. For on page 355 she confesses, to our surprise, that is what she has been wanting all along—happiness. Wanting, perhaps, not seeking, not even longing for, but wanting as a child of two might want its doll or its donkey, running into the room where Papa on his dying bed is being given an emetic, to see if it is on the counterpane, running out to see if it is in the cab that has come to take Aunt Charlotte to the Lunatic Asylum, and then forgetting all about it to stare at ‘Blanc-mange [43] going round the table, quivering and shaking and squelching under the spoon.’
(June 20, 1919.)
Love Lane — By J. C. Snaith
The coloured wrapper to ‘Love Lane’ depicts an elderly fat man in a yellow suit and a swollen white waistcoat. His felt hat is to one side, he wears white spats, a large bow-tie, and in the corner of his mouth, at an angle, flourishes a cigar. Thumbs in his armholes, away he swaggers from pretty Miss, who stands, blue-eyed, pale and golden-crowned, one lily hand raised, one lily hand clenched, looking after him with eyes of longing. And above them the title of the book, well-spaced and bold, hangs for a signboard.
Which of us, except in those last dread three minutes before the bookstall, when a man feels his mind dissolve as a wisp of smoke under the station roof and is as a little child in the hands of the braggart youth with a pencil behind his ear, would dream of inquiring any further? Which of us would not decide at a glance that ‘Love Lane’ was one of those half-sentimental, half-humorous mixtures—the refreshing non-alcoholic summer novel enfin, and pass it by? A superficial examination of the plot would not tend to alter that opinion. Here is the self-made vulgar old man, half hero, half bully, who aspires to be mayor of Blackhampton, and his timid wife, weeping for the old simple times. They have three daughters: one a successfully married snob; the second, a poor creature who has quarrelled with her parents, having married beneath her; and Sally, the baby, struck out of the old man’s will for joining the suffragettes and getting six weeks’ hard. The husband of the second girl is that familiar figure in our recent fiction—a pathetic tradesman—a little self-effacing greengrocer, a failure. He can’t [44] get hold of business, somehow, but he can grow a rose to beat any man, and the sunset reminds him of the ‘Inferno by Dant with Lustrations by Door.’
One can hardly imagine characters less promising, less original. Nevertheless they are the material that the artist has chosen and his success is the final justification of his choice. At the beginning we are shown these people, their interests and their lives, as all separate, scattered, and uncontrolled. They are puffed up or cast down, greedy, self-centred and vain—all except Amelia’s husband, who is merely a shadow of a man with a vague suspicion that things might be different, and therefore a vague grudge against things as they are.
Then, quite suddenly, we are conscious of an immense, inconceivable ring of fire closing in upon them; they are bathed in one terrible light, and William Hollis marches off towards it—out of his little misery in the shop in Love Lane into the anguish of his first experience.
In our youth we were taught that pain was not only a kind of necessary gymnastic exercise set us by the Lord—an immensely heavy dumb-bell to be lifted in His sight as a proof of what we could still stagger but not fall under—we were assured that we could not possibly appreciate the value of anything unless it had been first all but taken from us. Nowadays we are inclined to believe that it is neither pain nor happiness that heightens the value of life; it is rather the sense of danger, common to them both—danger which strips us of our false acquired security and demands of us that we shall take the risk.
William Hollis, before the war, had no particular desire to live, and the agonizing misery of life in the trenches—incredible as it might seem to our aged pastors and masters—did not awaken any new desire in him. But the feeling that any moment might be his last unlocked his lips. He made a friend, a man who came from his part of the country, an artist, who understood his fumbling speech, said for him what he wanted to say—taught him to see clearly what he vaguely glimpsed. The artist died, but [45] William Hollis went on living not only his new free life, but the life of his dead friend as well. He came home, and a wonderful late-flowering love blossomed for him and his wife. Then he was seriously wounded and the chance offered for him to leave the army and settle down with his woman. But he would not take it. For some unaccountable reason that she never understood, he decided to go back and die among the men with whom he had learned to live. What he had learned out there had been so marvellous to him, it had given such value to life, that he could not, without betraying himself, submit to anything less wonderful.
While this great miracle has been happening to William Hollis lesser changes, but changes no less wonderful, have happened to the others. They, too, have become human beings, but human beings ennobled.
But they are all grouped round the central figure, and upon him the author has brought all his power of understanding to bear. He has created an extraordinarily poignant character.
(June 27, 1919.)
The Bonfire — By Anthony Brendon
If a child alone on a desert island were to be visited suddenly by two presences—one, a divine, angelic winged creature with comfortable hands and eyes that shone with love and mercy, the other a hideous, scaly fiend, with a hissing tail, immense claws, and jets of flame for eyes—we imagine that the child’s first feeling would not be one of wonder and delight at the angel; it would be terror, uncontrollable terror, at sight of the fiend. He would not even be certain that the angel could save him. The angel would have no meaning, no significance, for him except as a possible safeguard from the fiend. Even if the angel were to bear him away and set him down under a [46] garden tree and play him a soft air upon a little harp, we do not believe that the child would ever recover from that monstrous vision. Terror might keep him from wandering far, might lend him a false look of listening to the harp, might cause him to join in the singing in the hope of keeping the fiend away, but one glimpse of the hissing tail again, and the doctrine of Divine Love would be nothing but a possible means of escape.
In a ‘coda’ to his book of short stories dealing with life at a Jesuit school, Mr. Brendon, while acclaiming the supreme excellence of the Jesuit education in that it teaches the doctrine of Divine Love, deplores the teaching of hell-fire to children. But, if we are to believe his account, were the flames to be removed, there would be left nothing but a cold fireplace. It is the devils who keep the schoolhouse in a glow, and not the angels. It is the sinfulness of those little boys, or their potential sinfulness, which is almost the whole concern of their masters. Lessons are only ‘of secondary consideration,’ play is a means of keeping out of mischief; during the day the boys are never out of sight of a warder, at night the dormitories are patrolled by a figure in felt slippers carrying a lantern. This ‘watching’ the author defends on the ground that ‘it did maintain a standard of bodily purity. The boys left school unsullied: was the price too high to pay?’
We find this idea of the persistent viciousness of normal healthy children very hard to swallow. But, if we have read Mr. Brendon aright, the Jesuits do not believe there is such a person as a normal healthy boy; there is the coarse, cunning and dirty-minded boy, and the too soft, too gentle, almost idiotic boy. Both of them are defective; both stand an equally good chance of going to hell, an equally poor one of getting to heaven; and since the human soul is far more easily ensnared by terror than by love, shake the devil at them five times for every once that you show them the angel. It is a sorry view of childhood. The argument apart, these stories are written with an [47] admirable simplicity of style. But whether the author is ironic or naïve is an intriguing little problem for the reader to solve.
(July 4, 1919.)
The Four Horsemen — By Vincente Blasco Ibañez
There is no need for the three loud solemn blasts of American criticism which herald this translation of ‘Los Cuatro Jinetes del Apocalipsis’; for although the fine edges are blurred and the whole is misted over by the heavy fingers of Charlotte Brewster Jordan, it is recognizable almost immediately as a powerful and distinguished novel. We say almost, for the first chapter, skilful and not extraordinary, in no wise prepares us for the magnificent second chapter, giving a description of the life of an aged Argentine landowner and chief, his family, dependents and possessions. Madariaga the Centaur is the author’s name for the foolish, wise old millionaire; it could not be more apt. As we read we are haunted by a vision of troops of horses, streaming away and away over limitless prairies, being rounded up, stamping and quivering and tossing their brilliant heads and then off again in a bounding line against the far horizon, until all that happens seems to become a part of this rich free life and rhythm.
To the old man there comes a young Frenchman, Desnoyers, seeking employment; the master takes a fancy to him. ‘He’s a regular pearl, this Frenchy…. I like him because he is very serious. That is the way I like a man.’ Desnoyers becomes part of the family and marries the elder daughter, Chica; the younger, La Romantica, runs away with another of the employees, a timid, weak creature who has been forced to leave Germany under a cloud. Madariaga detests Von Hartrott and detests his children
[48] … with hair like a shredded carrot and the two oldest wearing specs…. They don’t seem like folks wearing those glasses; they look like sharks. Madariaga had never seen any sharks, but he imagined them, without knowing why, with round glassy eyes like the bottoms of bottles.
But he gave the whole of his savage old heart to Desnoyers’ children, Julio and Chichi, teaching them, before they were eight years old, to ride, to eat beefsteaks for breakfast and to lasso wild horses.
When he died he left an enormous fortune to each of the two families, and the Von Hartrotts went off to Berlin to live in splendour, while the Desnoyers, not to be out-done, set up their home in Paris. By this time Desnoyers himself is old, and Julio and Chichi shorn of their wildness are exquisite, extravagant young persons, as Parisian as it is possible to be. Only the fat, comfortable Chica is the same.
When the war breaks upon them, Julio is an artist, a celebrated tango dancer and the lover of a famous society woman; Chichi the butterfly, is engaged to a senator’s son, and the father is become almost a maniac for buying rich furniture, motor-cars—all kinds of fantastic possessions for his splendid apartment in Paris and his castle at Villefranche-sur-Marne. They, with the rest of the world are lifted upon the huge ugly wave and shaken and tumbled, and strangely, at this moment, the mantle of Madariaga seems to descend upon old Desnoyers; he becomes, in the sober sense of the words, a great character. Full of fear for his treasures at the castle, and especially for an immense gold bath, the purchase of which he considered the culminating achievement of his wealth, he rushes off to the rescue—too late. The Germans are there, and the strange old man has to stand by, staring stupidly while they break up and plunder his toy, and kill the innocent villagers.
It is a dreadful fact that since it has been our misfortune to read so much and so much of the horror of war [49] we have become almost indifferent to it. We accept—we nod at a repetition—‘There it is; there’s the old tune played again’—but how moved are we? But when we are confronted by the figure of old Desnoyers, not taking part in it, just looking on, powerless and helpless, at the great laying-waste of life, the familiar tune becomes again an unbearable agony to hear.
Señor Ibañez does not believe in the purifying fire; or that out of evil good will come; or that God works in a mysterious way His wonders to perform; he believes that war is Hell. Neither can there be any line drawn so that here we are at war and here we are not at war. When old Desnoyers returns to Paris all is just as terrible as it was at Villefranche-sur-Marne, and the fact that because of it Julio turns soldier and goes off to fight for his father’s country and Chichi learns the anguish of love is not the result of a divine accident but of a diabolical one. The young men die in battle, but the women and the old men die just as surely in the battle against unseen, untiring enemies who can never be driven back.
Just as Madariaga in his old age gave his heart to Julio, the little wild fearless boy, so does Desnoyers live for his soldier son. Everything is changing, scattering, quaking, he feels that at any moment the earth may be swallowed up, yet he has this instinctive faith, very absurd, very firm that … ‘No one will kill him. My heart, which never deceives me, tells me so…. None will kill him.’ How many fathers in these hideous years have echoed these words? Chica, the anxious sorrowing mother, has her consolations; she can talk, she can go to church, weep, send Julio comforts, but the father’s worn-out old heart beats only to ‘my son, my son.’ And Julio is killed.
The last chapter describes a visit by the Desnoyers family to the battlefield where Julio is buried:
Tombs … tombs on all sides! The white locusts of death were swarming over the entire countryside. There was no corner free from their quivering wings. [50] The recently ploughed earth, the yellowing roads, the dark woodland, everything was pulsating in unresting undulation. The soil seemed to be clamouring, and its words were the vibrations of the restless little flags….
The father was staring at the rustic grave in dumb amazement. His son was there, there forever! … and he would never see him again! He imagined him sleeping unshrouded below, in direct contact with the earth, just as Death had surprised him in his miserable and heroic old uniform.
All was ended.
‘The Four Horsemen’ is not a subtle novel; the characters are simple, their emotions are simple and direct. But however complicated our acquired existence may be, we are, when the last clever word has been spoken, simple creatures. Living in this dishonourable age, it is a strange, great relief to us to have that simplicity recognized so nobly by Señor Ibañez.
(July 11, 1919.)
The Escape of Sir William Heans — By William Hay
It is strange how content most writers are to ignore the influence of the weather upon the feelings and the emotions of their characters, or, if they do not ignore it, to treat it, except in its most obvious manifestations—‘she felt happy because the sun was shining’—‘the dull day served but to heighten his depression’—as something of very little importance, something quite separate and apart. But by ‘the weather’ we do not mean a kind of ocean at our feet, with broad effects of light and shadow, into which we can plunge or not plunge, at will; we mean an external atmosphere which is in harmony or discordant with a state of soul; poet’s weather, perhaps we might call it. But why not prose-writer’s weather, too? Why [51] indeed! Are not your poet and your writer of prose faced with exactly the same problem? Can we of this age go on being content with stories and sketches and impressions and novels which are less than adventures of the soul? It is all so wearying, so wearying—this vision of the happy or unhappy pair or company, driving through the exhibition, meeting with adventures on the way and so safe home, or not safe home, at last. How can anything not trivial happen while the author still thinks it necessary to drive them at such a pace? Why will he not see that we would rather—far rather—they stayed at home, mysteriously themselves, with time to be conscious, in the deepest, richest sense, of what is happening to them…. Then, indeed, as in the stories of Tchehov, we should become aware of the rain pattering on the roof all night long, of the languid, feverish wind, of the moonlit orchard and the first snow, passionately realized, not indeed as analogous to a state of mind, but as linking that mind to the larger whole.
In ‘The Escape of Sir William Heans’ Mr. Hay has made the most of a curious and unusual opportunity to exploit this method. The scene of his story is Hobart, Tasmania; the time, between 1830 and 1840, when that place was a ‘thriving’ convict settlement; and the plot—how Sir William Heans, an English gentleman, transported for a crime against society, finds his captivity insupportable and makes three attempts at escape, of which the third is successful. But this simple plot is only the stem pushing up painfully into the forbidden light; from it there grow many dark, intricate branches and ashy fruits; the half-blind little girl, Abelia, clings to it, smothering and pale, like a clematis, and always wandering near there is the old native woman Conapanny, with her hidden bracelet of black hair.
Nevertheless, the figure of Sir William is always the outstanding one, and the author is so faithful to his state of mind that there are moments when he feels that all else that happens is a dream, dreamed by the prisoner as he sat [52] staring at an opaque glass window, seven by three, and crossed with iron bars. For that which is peculiar to the book is the persistent and dreadful sense of imprisonment. Hobart itself, locked in its pretty harbour and hemmed in on either side by huge tangled forests, is the first of a series of ‘boxes,’ each one a little smaller, a little narrower and tighter than the one that went before. Even the small official society with its convict servants, its precautions against escaped prisoners and its continual gossip about prison affairs is not ‘free’; an innocent gathering becomes a plot, with its victim, its watcher and its spy; they arrange a dance, and in the middle of the dancing a shot is heard, and a whisper goes round that someone has been killed upstairs—nobody knows who….
But the abiding impression is the horrible light in which poor Sir William sees this crude new town, half full of corrupt, filthy men, with its prisons and gaolers, and police patrols and natural defences of giant bush. All is bathed in the unendurable half-light and flicker that comes before a storm: great puffs of wind blow through the book, the sea arises, tossing and shaking—and the storm never breaks. Those who have lived in the Antipodes know such days—days of waiting for the storm to break, of getting up to another day of wind, of watching the strange divided pallor and darkness, of tearing voices, nervous, agitated, shouting against the wind. One feels that at any moment anything may happen—and nothing happens. Until at last when the storm does come its violence is almost a relief—a calm.
So, when Sir William finally escapes, his ordeal and his sufferings in the bush seem quite simple and endurable. We almost lose sight of him before he reaches the Bay, where the little broken-down ship sails in at last to rescue him. The suspense is over, and with it, in a way, everything is over.
It was a moment therefore of intense relief when the ship jibbed about and moved imperceptibly away on [53] the south-eastern tack. Slowly the sound of the waterfall softened, and slowly the great walls dimmed over the silent pool, and slowly they shrank under the wings and pinnacles of the forests, while these with their thousand shouldering sentinels slowly—very slowly—softened in the smoke of morning.
(July 18, 1919.)
Crabtree House — By Howel Evans
What is a ‘sweetly pretty’ novel? Standing in the library waiting for the book which never is in, we are constantly hearing this term of recommendation used by a certain type of young lady. ‘Oh, do read “Room for Two.” Of course “The Fireplace” is interesting and awfully thrilling and exciting, but it is not sweetly pretty.’ And the sweetly pretty book wins the day.
We imagine it is a novel which sets out to prove that the only form of government is government by the heart alone, and for the heart alone. There is a dreadful black monster, a kind of wild bull, looking over the fence at the innocent undefended pic-nic and plotting and planning how he may come in and upset and trample all—it is in the mind. Beware of it. Have nothing to do with it. Shun it as you would your mortal enemy. The innocent, the simple, the loyal, the trusty, the faithful, the uncomplaining—all, all are children of the heart. Have they ever plotted and planned, ever lain tossing through the dark hours—and thinking; ever smiled strangely and disappeared; ever slunk down narrow streets muttering something and frowning? Never! These are the habits of villains, of schemers, adventurers and clever men—these are the signs by which ye may know the children of the mind. If the mind triumphs—where is your happy ending? And as we understand the sweetly pretty novel it is part of its ‘appeal’ that you are never out of sight of [54] the happy ending from the very first page. Your faith is tried, but not unduly tried; the boat may rock a little and a dash or two of spray come over, but you are never out of harbour—never so much as turned towards the open sea.
Poor little human beings! From the success of the sweetly pretty novel one may learn how difficult it is for them to keep their faith intact in the triumph of good over evil. What consolation to turn from the everyday world with its obscure processes and its happy endings so remarkably well hidden to another existence where every other moment they may have the comfort of crying: ‘There now! I knew that was going to happen!’
What the outside reader does feel inclined to question is whether the simple people need be so incredibly simple and the innocent characters innocent to imbecility.
The heroine of ‘Crabtree House,’ for instance, at the age of nineteen when about to tell her father that her young man wishes to marry her, goes to these lengths:
‘… and Dad—’ Rosie came up and fingered her father’s collar, and put his tie straight and whispered a little shyly: ‘he—he—he’s been asking me when—when it’s to be. You know what I mean, Dad, don’t you? And I said, well, that—he—I—he—we must ask you, Dad. Don’t you see?’
That is hard enough to bear. But when Rose delivers herself later of:
‘But there, I won’t speak any more of that, Daddy…. I know it only makes you sad, and Daddie—may I—may I, to-night, like I used to when I was a little girl, and you used to call me Goldilocks, may I say my prayers on your knees?’
Amos could only smooth that silken hair once more; he could not trust himself to answer; and Rosie knelt at her father’s knees and with eyes shut and hands folded prayed in silence….
[55] we seem to hear the ‘Broken Melody’ as we read and the waves beating against the Eastbourne Pier. Let us be grateful to Mr. Howel Evans that we are not with Rosie and her husband in the early months of their wedded life when Rosie is caught hemming an infinitesimal garment…
But apart from this embarrassing exaggeration of the characters’ heavenly qualities ‘Crabtree House’ is as nice an example of the sweetly pretty novel as you might wish to find. Heart and mind are nicely balanced against each other, and though you would not doubt the issue of the fight, you cannot be absolutely certain how the victory will be obtained, and so—you read on.
(July 25, 1919.)
The Land They Loved — By G. D. Cummins
A woman is standing on the deck of an Atlantic liner, straining to catch the first glimpse of the Irish coast. She is ‘nearly five foot eight in height, with handsome features and a stately carriage … with this straightness of carriage there was a looseness of limb, a certain deft grace in all her movements, that made her a remarkable figure….’ We are told that she has come home because of a craving in her blood for the fields and wide spaces, because she was conscious that any life away from Ireland could never satisfy her profoundly. Whence exactly came these strange urgings of the spirit she did not know, but they were strong enough to drive her back to her brother’s farm…. ‘The memory of old forgotten times came drifting back to her from the outlying spaces of her mind as she watched and waited now.’ Thinking of the joy of working in the field again, of the warm welcome awaiting her from her brother Denis and Aunt Maggie, Kate Carmody wept tears of joy.
And all happened just as she had expected—if anything, better than she had expected. For the war had [56] brought prosperity to Droumavalla; the seven fat years seemed to be there. On the evening of her return, Kate went for a walk alone, and overcome she ‘knelt down and took up a little of the earth, cradling it for a moment in the palms of her hands and then letting it slip slowly through her fingers. Ah! how she loved the land….’
There is one difference. Many of the boys are gone to fight; her two boon companions, Steve and Michael Turpin, both are dead—one in France, one, a Sinn Feiner, killed in the Dublin rebellion. Only one brother, Eugene, is left, and he is lamed from a hurley match. This is a terrible shock to Kate. Dimly she had always thought that one day she would marry Steve or Michael; it is more terrible still for her to find that Eugene is a weak creature, father-ridden, obedient as a dog to his bullying old father for fear that the old man will leave the farm away from him. For, like Kate, Eugene has one passion. It is for the land. Nevertheless, he has the courage to ask Kate to marry him; but although she is tempted to, because of the part of him that is like his darling brothers, his cowardice and weakness shame her. She’ll never marry any but ‘a whole man.’
So far, Mr. Cummins succeeds in conveying, with astonishing ease and freshness, the charm of that country. As we read we seem to wade into its flowering beauty and warmth until we are lost like children wading in a ripe meadow. Sharply he pulls us up. No, Kate won’t have Eugene; she won’t stay in Droumavalla Off she goes to Dublin, and after a series of gloomy vicissitudes, she takes a position as cook at a salary of eighteen pounds a year, becomes very proud of having a fat policeman in her kitchen, devours servants’ novelettes, and on her marketing jaunts is thrilled to the marrow by salmon-pink dinner-blouses in a dingy draper’s. Good-bye to the land. Here is the area gate—the butcher’s boy and the baker’s boy. Here’s for high tragedy the fact she can’t get all the sugar she wants for her tea.
There is a last act when, finding she does not really love [57] the policeman, she hands him over to the housemaid, and returns to the farm to find Eugene’s old father dead, and Eugene a changed man—a whole man, the biggest man in the district, and still wishful to marry her.
Kate found it difficult to realize she had got back to the old life, and that her future would be lived with the man who walked beside her, this man who was so beautiful, so gentle, and yet so strong.
We find it incredibly difficult to understand why Mr. Cummins ruined so promising a book by ever taking her away from it.
(August 1, 1919.)
The Arrow of Gold — By Joseph Conrad
As we read Mr. Conrad’s latest published book we find ourselves wishing once again that it were a common practice among authors to let us know the year in which a book is begun and ended. This, of course, applies only to writers whose work does show very marked signs of progression, development, and expansion. The others, that large band who will guarantee to produce the same thrill with variations for you once, twice, or thrice yearly, do not count. For their great aim is never to show a sign of change—to make their next novel as good as their last, but no better—to take their readers for an excursion, as it were, but always to put up at the same hotel, where they know the waiters’ faces, and the way to the bathroom, and the shape of the biscuits that accompany the cheese.
But perhaps your real writer would retort that this was precisely the business of the critic—to be able to see, at a glance almost, what place this or that novel filled in the growing chain. Our reply would be that the spirit of the age is against us; it is an uneasy, disintegrating, experimental spirit, and there are moments, as, for instance, the moment after reading the ‘Arrow of Gold,’ when it [58] shakes us into wishing that Mr. Conrad had just added those four figures, thereby putting out once and for all that tiny flicker of dismay.
But—away with it! It is impossible not to believe that he has had this particular novel in the cellar for a considerable time—this sweet, sparkling, heady mixture in the strange-shaped bottle with the fantastic label. How does it stand being held up to the light, tasted, sipped, and compared with those dark foreign beverages with which he has made us so familiar?
The tale is told by a young man who confesses to being, at the time, ‘inconceivably young—still beautifully unthinking—infinitely receptive.’ Lonely and sober, at Carnival time in Marseilles he chums up with two remarkable gentlemen; one Captain Blunt, ‘eminently elegant,’ and the other a robust, fair little man in clothes too tight for him, a Mr. Mills. They are both connected with the plot to put Don Carlos on the throne of Spain—Blunt as a soldier, and Mills as a gun-runner; and the talk between these three comparative strangers is of the ship loaded with contraband which Mills brought from the Clyde, how it was chased by a republican gunboat and stranded, and whether it would be possible to escape the vigilance of the French Customs authorities and salve the cargo for the cause. The French Customs cannot be bribed, but a mere hint from high quarters … and here Captain Blunt ‘let fall casually the words, “She will manage it for you quite easily.”’ ‘She’ is the femme fatale, the woman of all times, the Old Enchantress, the idol before whom no man can do aught but worship, the Eternal Feminine, Donna Rita, woman.
During the night the two friends tell their young acquaintance her incredible story, and even arrange that he shall meet her next day at luncheon. This is her incredible story. When scarcely more than a child she was found in a robe à deux sous with a hole in her stocking, sitting with her feet in the damp grass, by an eccentric personality, a man of immense wealth and power, a [59] collector of priceless possessions, and a painter. In something less than a year and a half he brought her to Paris, and the first morning he took her riding an old sculptor greeted her and asked if ‘I might finish my artist’s life with your face; but I shall want a piece of those shoulders too…. I can see through the cloth they are divine…. Yes, I will do your head and then—nunc dimittis.’ ‘These,’ says Captain Blunt, ‘are the first words with which the world greeted her, or should I say civilization did….’ For four years she holds her court in the pavilion at Passy, treated, as she says, ‘as if I had been a precious object in a collection, an ivory carving, or a piece of Chinese embroidery,’ and all the great ones of the modern world pass in review before her. Then her protector dies, leaving her his fortune, his collections, his four houses, but not one ‘woman soul’ to whom she might turn, who would at least ‘have put her on her guard.’ There is a tragedy out of which she emerged, unspotted but more famous still, and a great, great power. Why is she, too, anxious that Don Carlos should have his crown? We are not told. The new young man, who takes the name of Monsieur George, joins the conspiracy, and lays his life at Donna Rita’s feet. From the moment he sees her coming down the crimson staircase all is over with the young man. He cannot find words big enough, bright enough, strong enough with which to describe that vision—‘the delicate carnation of that face, which, after the first glance given to the whole person, drew irresistibly your gaze to itself by an indefinable quality of charm beyond all analysis, and made you think of remote races, of strange generations, of the faces of women sculptured on immemorial monuments….’
… She said to us, ‘I am sorry I kept you waiting.’ Her voice was low-pitched, penetrating, and of the most seductive gentleness….
… Next moment she caught sight of some envelopes lying on the round marble-topped table…. She [60] seized one of them, with a wonderfully quick, almost feline movement.
… Her widened eyes stared at the paper. Mr. Blunt threw one of the doors open, but before we passed through we heard a petulant exclamation accompanied by childlike stamping with both feet, and ending in a laugh which had in it a note of contempt.
We have quoted this to show how complete a femme fatale Donna Rita was, how absolutely true to type. Where shall we look for a creature more richly equipped with all the allurements and fascinations?
The plot moves on. Blunt flashes his teeth, Mills disappears, Donna Rita’s inscrutable maid grows in inscrutability, a group of preposterous creatures move within its circle—they are there—they are gone—Monsieur George succeeds in adventure and almost succeeds in love—until there is a crisis so fantastical that we cannot but fancy Mr. Conrad of to-day smiling at its stage horrors. Out of the murderous clutch of a little man who loved her in her wild childhood and has haunted her ever since, a little man with whiskers ‘black and cut somewhat in the shape of a shark’s fin, and so very fine that the least breath of air animated them into a sort of playful restlessness,’ Monsieur George bears her away to a villa ‘embowered in roses,’ and to six months of happy love. But then Monsieur George is called upon to fight a duel with Captain Blunt, and when he recovers of his wound it is to find that the femme fatale, simply because she is a femme fatale, has forsaken him, leaving behind her for remembrance the arrow of gold.
This example of Mr. Conrad in search of himself, Mr. Conrad, a pioneer, surveying the rich untravelled forest landscape of his mind, is extraordinarily revealing. When we think of his fine economy of expression, his spare use of gesture, his power of conveying the mystery of another’s being, and contrast it with:
She listened to me, unreadable, unmoved, narrowed [61] eyes, closed lips, slightly flushed face, as if carved six thousand years ago in order to fix for ever that something secret and obscure which is in all women. Not the gross immobility of a sphinx proposing roadside riddles, but the finer immobility, almost sacred, of a fateful figure seated at the very source of the passions that have moved men from the dawn of ages….
—we are amazed to think of the effort it has cost him to clear that wild luxurious country and to build thereupon his dignified stronghold.
(August 8, 1919.)
Jeremy — By Hugh Walpole
‘I am determined,’ says the author, ‘to give the truth and nothing but the truth about the years of Jeremy’s life that I am describing.’
Jeremy Cole is a normal little English boy of eight.
… ‘Sausages!’ He was across the floor in a moment, had thrown off his nightshirt, and was in his bath. Sausages! He was translated into a world of excitement and splendour. They had sausages so seldom, not always even on birthdays, and to-day, on a cold morning, with a crackling fire and marmalade…. Oh, he was happy.
Later that same day he is told that next year he is to go to school.
… ‘School!’ he turned upon her, his eyes wide and staring. ‘School!’ he turned on them all.
The word tumbled from him. In his soul was a confusion of triumph and dismay, of excitement and loneliness, of the sudden falling from him of all old standards, old horizons, of pride and humility.
A week or two passes, and he is punished for telling a lie by not being allowed to go to the pantomime.
[62] At that judgment a quiver for an instant held Jeremy’s face, turning it, for that moment, into something shapeless and old. His heart had given a wild leap of terror and dismay. But he showed no further sign….
The day dragged its weary length along…. Once or twice the Jampot tried to penetrate behind that little mask of anger and dismay.
Spring comes. Our eight-year-old leans from the window; ‘beneath the rind of the soil he could feel the pushing, heaving life struggling to answer the call of the sun above it.’
And Summer. When, as he drove to the holiday farm, ‘the wind blew across the moor, with the smell of sea-pinks and sea gulls in it.’ When, upon his arrival,
his happiness was almost intolerable; he could not speak, he could not move, and in the heart of his happiness there was a strange unhappiness that he had never known before … so that he felt like a stranger who was seeing his father or his mother or his aunt for the first time.
We confess we had no idea, until Mr. Walpole put it to us in such good round terms, that a perfectly normal little boy of eight thought and felt like this, especially when, as in the case of this little hero, his external existence was so insufferably dull, tepid, and stodgy.
Jeremy and his sisters spent half their time going for walks with an imbecile old nurse and later with an imbecile old governess, and the other half sitting in the nursery either being good or not being good. Their father, the Rev. Herbert Cole, was an ‘excellent father,’ but ‘the parish absorbed too much of his time to allow for intimacies’; their mother, ‘the most placid woman in Europe,’ they saw for half-an-hour before bedtime. We are given no sign that the children had any part in the life of the house or any real rich life of their own. Their little thrills, excitements and alarms all seem to have [63] happened between meals, between bacon and strawberry jam, or treacle pudding, or fish pie, or the famous sausages, or saffron buns—a difficult diet to be gay upon. No wonder there are moments when poor Jeremy forgets his spring fancies and sighs—‘I’d like to eat jam and jam—lots of it,’ he thought. ‘It would be fun to be sick …’
But for all the author’s determination, ‘the truth and nothing but the truth’ does not shine through the small heart he would explore. There is, however, no doubt that he enjoyed writing his book. He positively gambols.
Her teeth clicked as always when her temper was roused, the reason being that thirty years ago the arts and accomplishments of dentistry had not reached so fine a perfection as to-day can show. She had, moreover, bought a cheap set. Her teeth clicked.
As for the publisher,—he will stand no nonsense from anybody.
Jeremy is, indeed, one of the finest child characters ever presented, and in him Mr. Walpole has achieved a triumph.
What is our appropriate geste as we bow ourselves out?
(August 15, 1919).
The Tender Conscience — By Bohun Lynch
To be a young man with agreeable manners, a tender heart, a large unearned income, and a passion for nothing in particular, is to be a young man doomed…. Here he comes, sauntering along the sunny side, laughing, looking his fill at the queer things and the delightful things displayed, making friends at a glance, sunning himself, wondering as he jingles the money whether or no he shall spend it, and blissfully unaware of Life, peering at him from behind the lifted blind, waiting for the moment when, all at once, some one’s shouting, he’s been cheated, he’s being [64] accused, they are pointing at him, the sun’s gone in. Until there comes a grim figure to lead him away and she lets the blind fall, muttering in her wicked old triumph: ‘I knew it. I could have told you from the moment I set eyes on him….’
This is an everyday occurrence in fiction as well as in life. But while we do not expect the victim to know, at any rate until long after the event, how or why he was captured, we do ask of our author that he should have been on the spot and the witness of every slightest move. Here, surely, is his golden opportunity of engaging our sympathetic attention, of conveying to us the innocence or the stupidity of his hero, of, at least, presenting him to us in the very centre of the stage, and making us feel how tremendously important it is that he should escape.
Mr. Lynch, who has chosen this theme for ‘The Tender Conscience,’ withholds the account of his young hero’s capture until chapter seven. Then he relates it, retrospectively, we must confess, to our extreme confusion. The book opens with an account of the convalescence after shell-shock of Jimmy Guise at his sister’s home in the country. Bathing, and chopping down trees, and playing with the houseful of small children bores Jimmy’s wife, who wants—‘London, chocolates—and some cushions … and papers first thing in the morning, and air raids, I expect.’ So back her adoring husband goes, and because there is a war on, he, who has never done a stroke of work in his life, enters a Government department—again for Blanche’s sake.
… Blanche with her lovely helplessness, her charming ennui, her delicious clothes, her exquisite refinement, her loveliness.
Time passes. With the death of one of his friends at the front Jimmy is reminded of a very horrible episode which happened before he and Blanche were ‘properly’ married. They had supper one Boat-Race Night with three of Jimmy’s friends, and under the influence of the [65] wine, he confessed that Blanche was not really his wife. Blanche had never noticed, but ever since then, ‘for her sake,’ he has been haunted—which brings us to chapter seven and the episode in Athens where Jimmy, travelling alone, picks up with a guide who gives him the history of the little lady with dark-red hair married to an obese old Greek. The guide does not spare her, even to a description of how he’d met her in London when she had a ‘very fine mash,’ and there is no hint that the lady is anything but bored. But fine, sensitive, lovable, chivalric Jimmy is determined to save her, and she to catch him. They engage a lawyer (the old Greek is only too willing), and while the entanglement is dissolved they live together in Provence and Paris and London. Thus, to the dismay of all his friends, is Jimmy captured by a woman who, for all that bewildering description of her charms, does not want a home, hates children, enjoys the society of women of filthy reputations, and talks in this strain:
‘I must finish that fatuous book. Such tripe you never! I think I shall slip on a cloak and go for a walk, and I shall probably get off with a nice young man.’
He suggests she should accompany him, and she is agreeable. ‘It’s no good being so mighty particular in these days—so long as I don’t meet hairy men who smell of beer.’
Frankly, there is not a single hint given why this promiscuous little rowdy should ever have captured this young man; and the idea that she should care whether four young men knew she was not church-married is so preposterous that Jimmy in his agony becomes a figure in the laughing-stocks of our imagination. Mr. Lynch cannot pretend there is a key in such a prison-door; there is indeed no prison—but only a lady with orchids, who never ought to have been there, disappearing to the right, and a thin girl with a baby carriage entering timid.
(August 22, 1919.)
[66] Storm in a Teacup — By Eden Phillpotts
There were two suitors for Medora’s hand: one, Jordan Kellock, a sober, earnest-minded young Socialist, who ‘wanted to leave the world better than he found it’; the other, Ned Dingle, a simple, happy-go-lucky fellow, fond of a laugh, and of fishing and shooting. Medora chose Ned Dingle, and chose quite rightly; he was her very man. But she would have liked to have Kellock, too. For she was one of that vast number of young women who have no real individual being and no convictions—save that they could be an inspiration and a star to any number of entirely different young men. What tragedy, then, to be married to one who is arrogant (and loving) enough to imagine that he has the whole of her, who would even laugh to scorn the notion of those undiscovered mines of varied treasure….
Such simplicity and uprightness not only exasperated Medora, but succeeded in pushing into the free air and light her preposterous flowers of longing. Ned wasn’t good enough for her, and Kellock was a saint of a man and far above her. This changed, as she brooded over it, into: Ned was horrible to her, and Kellock alone could save. Up they came, the false feelings, so strong and so sturdy that they seemed out of her control; they seemed real and none of her planting. Until Ned Dingle was a villain who beat his wife and all Kellock could do was to take her away and promise her marriage as soon as they were ‘free.’ But instead of the fine adventure she had anticipated, the going away proved a rod that beat Medora back into her senses. For Kellock held her in such reverence as a poor martyr with the almost divine courage to leave all and come to him that it was easy for him to treat her as a sister while they waited for their freedom. Then Medora turned and twisted, threw him the ugly [67] mask she had worn and went back to her husband, positively refreshed by the affair, with the renewed love of life and gaiety and gentleness of a convalescent.
The ‘Storm in a Teacup’ rages in a little village on a hillside, on the banks of the river Dart. The little village is full of life, for above the small neat houses lying in their gardens and smothering apple orchards there rises a huge building—Dene Mill—where beautiful hand-made paper is produced. The conditions necessary to its production are good air, sunlight, running water, exquisite cleanliness, and above all honest workmen who not only take a pride in their craft, but are eager for the reputation of their mill. This engaging state of affairs sounds fantastic, nowadays, yet Mr. Phillpotts, by describing every separate stage of manufacture, bringing us in touch with the men and women engaged, showing us how beautiful is a vat-man’s fine ‘stroke,’ what disaster it were to lose it, succeeds in making us believe in its existence. His three central figures are workers at the mill, and their comedy of character is acted before a shrewd, exacting audience of fellow-workers, admirably portrayed.
What an oasis is this in the sooty desert of novels whose milieu is the factory—powerful novels, slices of life, reeking, bawling novels, where the heroine is none the worse for a fight with hatpins against her mother, for preference, and the hero breaks up the home for a burnt bloater!
(August 29, 1919.)
The Sleeping Partner — By M. P. Willcocks
If there is one character in modern English fiction whom we wish with all our heart the Boojum would call for, it is the man or woman who from childhood up has suffered from what our psycho-analytical skimmings have taught [68] us to call the sex-complex. It were foolish to deny that a large number of young persons have been severely handicapped, not so much by their parents telling them of the cabbage and the angel with a black bag in reply to their infant speculations as by their healthy adolescent curiosity being treated as a disease so disgusting that they must be kept in the dark at all costs and never told the unpleasant—if sacred—truth. But it were equally foolish to deny that the progress towards light of these unfortunate ones makes heavy reading. What we do not know about it is not for want of telling; it has been during the past few years the pet subject of our young writers to break a pen upon. But there is a rarer version; that of the sensitive child cursed with dissolute sex-ridden parents whom only to watch is poison enough, and this it is that Miss Willcocks has chosen. At the age of thirteen, her hero, Silas Brutton, was taken by his foxy old father, Nicky Brutton, the publisher, to see the prisoners at Portland Gaol. And a peculiarly odious servile convict was pointed out to them as having on one and the same evening received chapel membership and criminally assaulted a child. This story Brutton père found admirable … ‘as a man of the world the character of the crime tickled his sense of humour …’ but the episode infected the boy with the disease which was to ruin more than half his life. From that day he was fit for nothing but to be sickened by what he saw and heard. Life to him was so odious with its ‘human spawning’ and ‘tide of birth’ that when his father died, leaving him the publishing business, he let all slide because of his horror of the kind of stuff—‘the goat’s foot among the vine leaves’—that the old man had built his house upon.
‘Warped’ (he cries), ‘of course it’s left me warped. But the worst of it is that in publishing there seems to be no mean between Sunday School piffle and this painted harlotry….’
It is curious that the author seems to find something [69] extraordinarily fine, pitiful and ‘lovable’ in Silas. As for his brother Ned, who wrests the business from him, we are dismally conscious of failing to share the approval of his proper masculinity, his passion for ‘comfort’ (which being interpreted is a natty little woman, rather red in the face, taking a pie out of the oven), his recklessness and jolly way of seeing things through. We are to believe that Ned is the kind of man that women adore; he is the big child beating on the table with his spoon who is and ever shall be irresistible. We confess that after we have been forced to watch him at table the whole book through, and then come upon: ‘he had been looking anxiously for that slight ooziness in the middle of the omelet that makes its perfection,’ we wish him dead.
But to return to Silas. He finds salvation in a brave, splendid little girl, Nan Carey, whose passion is biology.
‘Look,’ cried she, ‘at the way science gets her own back—after silly vapouring: there she shows the processes of birth and burgeoning, of begetting and conception, from the dance of the atoms to the birth … of a child-animal.’ … Silas found himself taken right into the inner chamber of his own fears, of his own disgusts. To Nan, the blind principle of fecundity from which he shrank … was … the ocean of life in which she sported….’
This, and a very great deal more of it, convinces him; the stream of life runs fair, ‘while before, as far as he was concerned, it had been stifled in slime.’ ‘And,’ to quote Miss Willcock’s final words, ‘the moon and the stars carried on till the dawn once more snuffed them out.’
(August 29, 1919.)
[70] The Old Madhouse — By W. de Morgan
At the conclusion of ‘The Old Madhouse’ there is a very illuminating little note by Mrs. de Morgan explaining her husband’s method of working. She relates how he prepared no plot beforehand, but ‘created his characters and then waited for them to act and evolve their own plot … he waited, as he expressed it, “to see what they would do next.”’ It is not that we consider the method itself unusual or remarkable; but what is peculiar to Mr. de Morgan is the length of time he was prepared to wait, not only his unlimited patience at spiritual railway stations, but the feeling he produces that the waiting, with all its little disturbances and attractions, is really more agreeable than the arrival. In fact the longer he can stave off what Henry James has called ‘the august emergence’ of his travellers the better he is pleased. Even when it is so long overdue as to cause anxiety and then alarm and then apprehension, he cannot surrender himself fully to these emotions so as to be overcome, but rather, as it were, takes an occasional ‘nip’ at one or the other of them to refresh his excitement and revivify his sense of anticipation. This, of course, makes it impossible for his words to be serious in ‘the grand style’; but his sense of humour is extremely engaging (especially as directed towards youth), his curiosity very reckless and unrestrained, he knows just how large a pinch of sentimentality will stimulate our jaded sympathies, and he has a taking way with the lower orders, with small children and pet animals. Added to these he has a habit, which either you like, or dislike very much, of taking the reader into his confidence, half-naïvely, half-slyly … a kind of ‘But aren’t you yourself completely floored by this disappearance of Doctor Carteret? Can you, for the life [71] of you, imagine what has happened to the old fellow?’ At that the young wild horses will stamp their hoofs and break away from the leisurely hand, but those of us who are inclined to enjoy an occasional small bout of mental convalescence—a day in bed, watching the lights chase the shadows—will suffer this gladly.
‘The Old Madhouse’ is Mr. de Morgan’s last bouquet; Death beckoned before the final blooms had been gathered. How long the novel would have been it were rash to suggest, for there are five hundred and fifty-five pages of it and still the character who disappeared on page twenty-three is not accounted for. He is the Rev. Drury Carteret, a man six foot high, weighing twenty stone, headmaster of a grammar school; a very difficult figure to cause to melt into thin air. Nevertheless the author manages it and most convincingly; now he is there, standing in a passage at The Cedars (commonly known as The Old Madhouse because its last tenant was a doctor who took mental patients), and now he is not there—gone, vanished, never to be seen in the solid flesh again. His only relations appear to be Frederic Carteret, a nephew, whose trustee he is, and Fred’s mother, his sister-in-law, with whom he has been for twenty years and more romantically and hopelessly in love. It was on Fred’s behalf that he was at The Cedars; for Fred (a handsome young fellow of whom all were agreed that if he would only concentrate he could do anything) was about to be married and had chosen the long-deserted house with its vast apartments, eighteen bedrooms and dismal reputation as an ideal premier nid—especially when he hits upon the superb idea of sharing it with his great friend Charlie (or Nosey) Smith, who is similarly bound to a beautiful young creature whom he burns to watch walking up and down their own stairs. But Fred’s dream disappears, too, though not so mysteriously. His young woman feels, and quite rightly, that after he has set eyes on Nosey Smith’s Lucy he is never wholly hers again. This is preposterous, but it is true. So Charlie and Lucy buy the Old Madhouse, [72] and Fred, who is, of course, perfectly safe because of his great love for Charlie, spends there all the time that he does not devote to his mother and the search for Uncle Dru. What has happened to him? Why was the body never found? But the only one of them whose anxiety is not mainly curiosity is Mrs. Carteret. Fred feels through her when he is with her, but when he is absent even his interest seems to flag. How, otherwise, could he hear a loud voice calling in the passage where the Doctor was last seen: ‘Come back, Fred!’ and be content with ‘any’ explanation, even when the phenomenon occurs three times? How could he know that the doctor’s ghost, his substantial back view, is seen by nearly everybody, at the same spot, and never attempt to investigate any farther?
The truth is that the poor young man is bewitched by a ravishing serpent. Gradually, dreadfully against his will, he is drawn nearer and nearer. There comes a moment when he just escapes being swallowed, and manages to tell his mother, who rushes him to Switzerland, but it is only for a moment. The serpent follows, Fred is eaten, Charlie’s happiness and faith in life destroyed, and Mrs. Carteret’s unhappiness immeasurably increased. In this evil hour the ghost of the lost man not only appears, but is ushered into a little study by the housemaid who takes him for real. He has come, too late, to warn the absent Fred, but it is Charlie who takes the message and is as certain of his reality as the housemaid. His conclusion is that the doctor is mad and must be watched as he leaves the house, but while he is away for three minutes, giving orders to the gardeners to be on the look-out, the inevitable happens. No one is there on his return—no one … and here Mr. de Morgan laid aside his pen.
So there is in the middle of the picture this immense old hero, avuncular, obese and kindly, leaning on his umbrella, blowing a sostenuto blast on his nose and saying ‘char-char!’ to all the stupid questions. Everything is grouped round him, dependent on him; he is the figure [73] who causes the roundabout to swing and glitter and turn, and yet he is a man of air.
His fate is made known to us by Mrs. de Morgan; but how much pleasanter it is to ignore the trap-door, the lunatic bath and the grating, and remain in the dark.
(September 5, 1919.)
Tamarisk Town — By Sheila Kaye-Smith
Were Miss Kaye-Smith a painter, we should be inclined to say that we do not feel she has yet made up her mind which it is that she wishes most to paint—whether landscape or portraits. Which is it to be? Landscape—the blocking-in of a big difficult scheme, the effort required to make it appear substantial and convincing, the opportunity it gives her for the bold, sweeping line—it is plain to see how strongly this attracts her. Portraits—there is a glamour upon the human beings she chooses which fascinates her, and which she cannot resist. Why should she not be equally at home with both? What is her new novel ‘Tamarisk Town’ but an attempt to see them in relation to each other? And yet, in retrospect, there is her town severely and even powerfully painted, and there are her portraits, on the same canvas, and yet so out of it, so separate that the onlooker’s attention is persistently divided—it flies between the two, and is captured by neither.
Her theme is the development of a small Sussex town into a select seaside resort, patronized by the wealthy and aristocratic, not on account of its natural beauties alone, but because of the taste and judgment with which its reformation has been achieved. There is a time when it seems established in its enchanting prosperity for ever, but the hour of its triumph contains the seeds of its downfall. Very gradually, and then more swiftly, it is attacked [74] by vulgarians, who are allowed to have their way, until at the end, wretched, shoddy, decayed little place that it is become, it is the scene of a brawl between drunken trippers. Sic transit gloria Marlingate.
It is, of course, absurd to imagine that Marlingate could grow, come to flower, blow to seed, without the aid of man, and yet at the moments when Miss Kaye-Smith is least conscious of the forces that govern it, she is at her happiest. Wandering at will in the Assembly Rooms, in the beautiful little Town Park, along the white, gleaming parade, in the woods at French Landing, her style is very natural and unforced, and, until the beginning of the disintegrating process, her touch is light. But, after all, this is only the landscape half. Let us examine the ‘portraits.’ The chief is Edward Monypenny, creator of Marlingate, who, at the age of twenty-eight, is in a position powerful enough to determine the future of the town. This curious young man, with his shock of white hair, coal-black eyes and black side whiskers, is, for all his cynical aloofness, in love with Marlingate; we are to believe that, until he meets with the little wild governess, he has never known what it was to feel for anything more responsive than a new block of houses or a bandstand. But she, Morgan, Morgan le fay, running out of the wood with dead leaves in her hair, very nearly makes havoc of his resolute ambition in the old, old way.
… She had crept towards him, drooping like a wild hyacinth in her blue gown. Then suddenly she flung her body straight, flung back her head, her arms were round him soft and strong as fox-glove stalks, and her hair, falling loose, trailed on his lips till it tasted sweet as syllabub.
But while she is still a woodland elf, his old love wins:
He turned back to Marlingate, as a man who has left his work to watch from the window an organ-grinder with a performing monkey turns to his desk again.
[75] Years pass, and all his dreams are realized. Royalty has put its special blessing upon Marlingate, and Monypenny is Mayor, in cocked hat and black and crimson robes. And this is the hour chosen by the enchantress for her return—in scarlet. ‘Crimson and silky, a peony trailing its crinkled petals … it came.’
This time the long, slanting eyes eat him up with their spells, and she has her way with him.
Then she dropped her sunshade, which rolled in a whirl of scarlet down the slope, like a poppy falling, and stretching out her hands, took his white, struggle-worn face into their cool palms, drawing it down to her silent mouth.
It is a matter for wonder that, in spite of all the many pages describing the progress of their guilty love, in spite of the tremendous pains taken by the author to depict the agonies of Monypenny upon his discovering that sweet Morgan le fay holds in contempt, nay hates, his beloved Marlingate, and the other tremendous pains taken to show Morgan’s despair upon realizing that Edward will not flee with her to foreign parts—we are never once moved by these two creatures. Marionettes they are, and marionettes they remain, jigging in a high fierce light that Miss Kaye-Smith would convince us is the fire of passion, until the last puppet-quarrel and the last glimpse of the heroine, ‘half under the water, half trailing on the rock … something which, from the top of the cliff, looked like a dead crimson leaf.’ This extreme measure is for love of Monypenny, who, at first, is properly grateful for his freedom. Again he is a man like a town walking, until one day he is filled with the idea that his first love is fattening upon the dead body of his second love, and that, after all, a woman is more to be desired than bricks and mortar. This starts working passion number three—he will kill that which killed her, and so have his revenge.
Here, to our thinking, the book ends. All that is going to happen has happened; we are at the top of the hill. [76] Below us lies Marlingate, in its prosperity, ‘lying there licked by the sun,’ and gazed upon by the man who has made it, and is about to unmake it. But the author is, if we may be pardoned the expression, as fresh as when she started. New characters appear—a wife for Monypenny, a little wooden son who has time to grow up and marry the daughter of Morgan le fay (so like, yet so unlike) and to live his father’s history all over again before Marlingate is destroyed. And the years roll by, unbroken, heavy, like waves slapping against the promenade, the vulgar pier, before Miss Kaye-Smith is content to leave Marlingate to its fate.
How does it happen that a writer, obviously in love with writing, is yet not curious? This is the abiding impression left us by Miss Kaye-Smith; she is satisfied to put into the mouths and the hearts and minds of her characters the phrase, the emotion, the thought that ‘fits’ the situation, with the result that it does not seem to matter whether they speak, feel or think. Nothing is gained by it. They are just what they are. The plot’s the thing—and having decided upon it she gets her team together and gives out the parts. There is but to speak them. And into the hand of Morgan le fay she thrusts a scarlet umbrella, she throws a cherry cloak about her and clothes her in a scarlet dress—and sets her going.
(September 12, 1919.)
Susan Lenox — By David Graham Philips
It would seem to have been the desire of Mr. Graham Philips to do for his subject, ‘Susan Lenox,’ the same service that Tchehov declared to have been his intention to perform for the subject of ‘Ivanov.’ With his ‘Ivanov’ he wanted to put an end, once and for all, to a typical character—that of the suppressed, melancholy [77] man, the failure, the half-cynical unfortunate, rejected by life, but acclaimed by modern Russian literature as the child of the age. The method he chose was to write a play whose hero was the embodiment not only of all these known characteristics, but of all possible developments of which they might be the fruitful soil. Feeling as he did that ‘Ivanov’ was the vague, easy temptation for Russian writers to yield to, he wished to leave nothing undiscovered, nothing unremarked, so that this subject at least, after his treatment of it, should be ‘out of court.’
Now the chief concern of modern American fiction, as far as our knowledge of it goes, is sex. It is not treated humorously, as in France, or intensely, as in England; it is treated seriously. There are many moments when our American cousin makes us feel we are only foolish, inexperienced children as far as this great subject is concerned. We are David and Dora, giving each other bouquets, and laughing and loving, and kissing the little dog and kissing each other, and America is the grim Julia with her ‘Play on, ye may-flies.’ But, after all, the cause of Julia’s disillusionment was never quite plain, and the reason for America’s is right there, to be picked up in the next magazine you open: it is the ferocity of man. Make no mistake about it, man, whatever disguise he may affect, however young, husky and brilliant he may be, however old, senile and ugly, from the millionaire downwards, is nothing but a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. It is not his fault; he may resist it; he may put up the most devastating fight while the lights of little old New York burn as brightly as ever; he may read poetry, weep, or, grim-faced, in his revolving chair with telephone attached, before his immense roll-top bureau, he may make a vow, before the photograph of a sweet-faced little woman with white hair, to see this thing through. A lion or a lion manqué he remains. On the other hand, he may not resist it; and then his wildness and capacity for devouring are more terrific than anything Europe has encountered.
As is usual in such cases, to get the full fine flavour of the [78] hunting you must sing the innocence and tenderness of the prey. The American young girl—the Bud—the Millionaire’s daughter who has never grown up—how well we know her! How exquisite she is! how fresh! how new to the light! What a sight, growing and blowing in Momma and Poppa’s garden, for the wicked lion as he peeps through a hole in the garden wall!
All this the magazine and the novel are founded on. But, after all, they have never done more than treat of one particular example at a time of villainy and innocence. Each American writer has been content with his corner of the hunting field, and disinclined to wander, though all have been united into one great company over the choice of subject, the lamb fleeing the lion. We imagine that Mr. Graham Philips, after a grand survey, has sickened of modern America’s typical characters as Tchehov wearied. And so he has given us, in two packed volumes, Susan Lenox. He has taken his time; he has not faltered. There is not a corner of the vast ground, not a pit, not a slimy ditch, not a stinking heap, not a glittering restaurant, that he has left unprobed. Man, the lion, roars, and Susan, sweet, pure, with her white swelling bosom, her alluring ankles and eyes that are now grey, now deepest violet, flees….
There may be perhaps a question whether Tchehov has succeeded in doing what he set out to do. But in the case of the American author there can be no doubt, no shadow of doubt whatever.
(September 19, 1919.)
A Man and His Lesson — By W. B. Maxwell
Those readers who are accustomed to, and, indeed, confess a fondness for, the delicate preliminaries of a performance—the light rush of arpeggios, the few [79] inquiring chords, the little silence—will find themselves strangely shaken and surprised by the first chapter of ‘A Man and his Lesson.’ Alas, poor souls! they will barely have settled themselves, barely have furled their fans and opened their programmes before p. 14, and there is the hero standing up and bowing, the heroine looking back at him from the doorway, kissing the tips of her fingers, their grande passion, that only began on p. 5, enjoyed and resigned, and the first item on the programme, in fact, over and done with.
Certainly, the circumstances were exceptional. Bryan Vaile, playwright and barrister, did not start life until the age of thirty-three. ‘Till then all had been colourless.’ Then, for no reason he could explain, the world smiled and he plunged—into the blue-blooded sea of London aristocracy. The mermaid, the siren who lifted a white arm to him, was Diana Kenion, the greatest beauty and the most celebrated young woman in Mayfair. Tall, slender, exquisite—a nymph in blue gauze, charming the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury, painters and poets, alike, she had but to beckon. After being with her ‘he was like a mortal emptied and exhausted by divine excesses. He was not an ordinary young man going home to bed—he had fallen from Olympian heights….’
But she cannot understand why he has not a telephone. He has one installed. And sometimes she rings him up very early in the morning, and ‘while he listened he thought of her standing with sandled feet among daffodils … with the sunbeams touching her bare arm and neck …’ And her telephone? Or late at night when ‘he heard her give a little sigh that was like a breath of air in the foliage of the dark grove where she was lying down to rest.’ With her telephone? And she cannot understand why he has no money. If he had made a real success…. ‘Oh, how I would shove you along!’ But he has not made it and she loves money, so ‘Good-bye’ it must be, and ‘Good-bye’ it is.
[80] With the exit of Diana the pace becomes more normal. The scene is Bournemouth and the heroine is Mabel, warm and plump and brown. This time he is her Diana, her hero, her knight who cuts the cords that bind the young girl to the tree, and he treats her as Diana had treated him. No, for at heart he is ‘not a bad sort really,’ and so they marry, and acquire children, money, success, a house in Regent’s Park and quite a number of friends. ‘On a warm July Sunday there would be sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty or two hundred people in the garden.’ We do not know to what extent Mabel and Bryan enjoyed these parties, but the author simply cannot tear himself away. ‘The Man and his Lesson’ fade and are forgotten while he shows us round the garden, introducing, explaining, and crying the delightful news that ‘Mr. Odo Mainz, the composer, with his wife and clever, charming daughters, came frequently, but never as frequently as his hosts would wish,’ etc., until, nobly sacrificing his enjoyment, he produces ‘on a patch of gravel in front of the verandah’ Diana again, now the wife of the Duke of Middlesborough.
But this time there is Mabel, the sanctity of home life, his reputation, the good opinion of London’s dramatic critics to be considered; Diana has to use her telephone quite desperately before he is won back. Four days and nights of bliss, and he returns to Mabel and the children a ruined man, determined to take veronal before his disgrace is made known. But in that dark hour the housemaid brings in the Daily Mail—and war is declared between England and Germany. Hurrah for August, 1914! He is saved. Off he goes to be honourably killed. Off he goes to the greatest of all garden parties—and this time there is no doubt as to his enjoying himself. War has its black side, but the lessons—the lessons it teaches a man! Where else shall a man learn the value of brotherly love, the wisdom and friendliness of the generals at the Base, the beauty of Mr. Lloyd George’s phrase ‘the War to end war,’ the solid worth [81] and charm of a London restaurant, a London club, a London theatre? Diana died while the garden party was at its liveliest, and Vaile was thus freed to live, to be wounded, to confess his fault to Mabel, and to be forgiven. So, after having ‘come out again to the grand old task,’ to ‘strike another blow for England and the cause,’ Bryan Vaile is free to go home, having learned his last and greatest lesson, which is never to answer the telephone again.
(September 26, 1919.)
Desire and Delight — By F. E. Penny
She was known at the hospital in Poona as Nurse Mary, and nobody but Jimmy Dumbarton, the young surgeon-in-charge, knew that her real name was Rosemary Eden-hope, and that she was a married woman. This was her story. At the beginning of the war, at her lover’s calling, she had come out to India with ‘a wedding costume complete with veil and orange blossom,’ to find, on the morning of her arrival, that her beloved is ordered to start for Egypt the very afternoon of that day. Why can’t they go to the Cathedral straight away? ‘She had to be informed there were still certain preliminaries that must be effected before the marriage could take place.’
‘My own love! I must go!’
A year passes. To tide over the waiting she turns hospital nurse. Then he returns—but not the handsome, well set-up, clean-shaven officer to whom she had clung in her ‘abandonment of love and grief’; a gaunt bearded man, with haggard face and semi-scorched eyes, stood before her. But, bravely believing that it is only fatigue, she tells him she has arranged for their marriage on the morrow, and for their honeymoon in the hills. But the change is more than beard deep. Maurice is silent, [82] sombre, giving her no return for her kisses, waking to animation only to wonder whether lunch is ready. After a gloomy lunch, afternoon, and dinner, she asks him if he would like to postpone to-morrow’s ceremony.
Her sweetness and love, her readiness to sacrifice herself for him, should have been an irresistible appeal. It left him colder than ever.
Nevertheless, his answer is ‘No, no!’ And so she takes him to the church, finds Jimmy Dumbarton to give her away, sees that he is married to her, buys his railway ticket for him, and starts him off on their honeymoon to the bungalow called ‘Desire and Delight.’
All that a loving, brave, right-minded young woman could do Rosemary has done, but the poor wretch continues woe-begone and dreary, moving like a man in a dream. What can have happened to him? Could a year at Gallipoli spent among the dead and dying account for it? His eyes had definitely altered…. ‘Other eyes had looked into his with the coming of death, and seemed to have left their reflection.’ And when the adoring Rosemary asks him if he would like the bungalow re-arranged (for there are two single bedrooms at present), pinched, haggard and listless, he signifies ‘No.’ She bears it for a month. Then:
‘You are a wicked man and I hate you! I hate you! … I would have given you my life as I gave you my love…. I go out of your life, bearing your hated name, thanking you for nothing, and cursing you for having spoiled my life.’
They part at this, and she resumes her V.A.D. work, where she finds ‘scope for the generous sympathy and warm affection towards suffering humanity that was her second nature.’
Another interval—we are not told how long—and the news comes that Maurice Edenhope is appointed commandant of the hospital where she is working. What [83] shall she do? How shall she meet him? Has she forgiven him? Does a woman ever forgive such a blow to her—pride. Jimmy Dumbarton puts off the uncomfortable day for her. In the same hospital there is a fine young native officer whose convalescence is retarded by his longing for his young wife. Nurse Mary is appointed to take him home to his palace and to stay with him until he is well, and her disaster with Edenhope is almost forgotten in her heroic attempts to overcome the intrigues of the harem and to bring the ardent young man and his bride together. Alone, single-handed, she fights the superstitions, powers, poisons, mock-tigers, attempts at murder, which are her daily portion, and at last succeeds, and has the satisfaction of hearing the door bolted and barred upon the fortunate ones. But their bliss looks in her face; its name is Might-have-been. And when Colonel Edenhope calls to inquire after nurse and patient, though, of course, her love is still quite, quite dead, she overdoes her free-and-easy indifference. The beard has gone, too. He is soigné as of old, and full of that vitality which once upon a time compelled her. He, on his side, is more attracted than ever. ‘She was the embodiment of perfect womanhood upon whom no man could look without admiration and no husband or lover without desire.’ ‘Sweetest woman on earth … Am I going to have any luck? It won’t be a walk-over….’
Yes. For in an expansive moment he confides in Jimmy Dumbarton the history of his illness caused by his awful sufferings in Gallipoli, and how he had been driven half mad and was cured by open-air treatment in Scotland. Books, the latest novels, flowers and kindness, have failed to soften Rosemary, but this tale melts her. And he kisses her to ‘Maurice! husband! kiss me! again! again! I am starving for want of your love.’
Back once more to the bungalow, and this time there has been an alteration in the arrangement of the rooms with Colonel Edenhope’s most ardent approval.
Throughout this novel the author is at great pains to [84] assurers of the heroine’s charm. She is the best type of young English womanhood; it is, indeed, she, and women like her, who have made the British Empire what it is. Women like Rosemary, once they have secured their Edenhope, will send him off to the wars without a murmur, hear of his being wounded with a thrill of pride, and confide in their best friend that ‘even if Maurice died I suppose I should just have to carry on.’ They might, also, nurse in hospitals for months on end, and mark the terrible things that happen to a man’s mind as well as his body, and still be capable of acting towards another as this newly-wedded wife acted. Why not? Surely love is stronger than war-shock? Surely, faced by a fine blooming young woman, a man should be able to forget everything else?
‘Her sensitive nature,’ says Mrs. Penny. But, no! That we cannot allow. She is as true to life as you like; as common, as popular; we are ready to believe she may be found any day in Society Faces or the Lady’s Magazine. But sensitive—never! Pray take away the word, Mrs. Penny. For her strength depends upon her denial of it.
(October 3, 1919.)
September — By Frank Swinnerton
Perhaps it is owing to the composure and deliberation of Mr. Swinnerton’s style in this his new novel that we are sensible of a slight chill in the air long before Marion Sinclair discovers that she is in the September of her life. We are given, at the very outset, a full-length and highly finished portrait of her: Portrait of a Lady, ætat. thirty-eight—blond, beautiful, extraordinarily reserved, ‘completely, it seemed, mistress of herself in every emergency.’ She has been married for fifteen years to a wealthy City man whom she knows thoroughly well and is clever enough not to despise. She is childless and without relatives or [85] intimate friends, but in the country, where she spends the greater part of the year, her neighbours find her mysterious enough and sympathetic enough to make them wish to confide in her, even while they feel ‘rather ashamed in her company of their own silliness and passion for excitement.’ Fond of flowers, enthusiastic over her bees, a good tennis-player, playing the piano with a sensitive touch, though without technical equipment enough for Chopin’s Ballade in A Flat—does the author mean to be cruel or to be kind in thus describing her? We are never wholly certain, but having her thus framed and glazed, we are rather acutely conscious of his task when he proceeds to turn the lady into flesh and blood.
The first shock administered is a slight but unexpected one. Offering her husband the cigarettes one evening: ‘What are they?’ he demanded. ‘Two-toed-Twins?’ And she realizes almost immediately that the silly name is a joke he has with another woman, and that he is being unfaithful to her…. ‘She is a little resentful.’ Then some neighbours come to dinner, bringing with them a nephew, Nigel Sinclair, a handsome young man of twenty-six, with a very ardent, naïve way of talking that stirs her strangely…. Finally, two young people come to visit her, one of whom, Cherry Mant, a girl of twenty, is of the very nature of Spring. She is not gentle May, but rather early April, or even late March—for there are moments when she is wild and treacherous—a little savage, trying to destroy her own flowers, a little fury, with a needle of ice unmelted in her heart. But there are other moments when she is Beauty, untouched and unbroken, smiling at the sun and at Marion and Marion’s husband. The ideas, emotions and suggestions that she evokes in Marion seem inexhaustible; she might be the first young woman whom the older woman had ever encountered. Every glance of hers is a surprise and a wonder, and when Marion discovers her locked in her husband’s arms, her astonishment is not particular; it is all a part of her endless astonishment. Cherry, on her side, is drawn to Marion. She [86] has a longing to confide in the older woman, to try and explain her puzzling self, to try and find out why she is Cherry, but nothing comes out of these intense, emotional dialogues; Cherry is still baffling, and Marion is still wise:
‘Aren’t I funny!’ whispered Cherry. ‘You’re not funny.’
‘At any rate I’m not unfunny,’ protested Marion.
These words occur at the close of one of their most poignant interviews. There is no hint from the author that he does not mean them to be taken au grand sérieux, but we shudder to consider how many female conversations have ended on precisely that note.
On the very day that Cherry and Howard are discovered together, to comfort Marion’s pride comes Nigel Sinclair. He is young, he is twenty-six, and he admires her. He never thinks of her as old—only as ‘wonderful’—and so September defies Spring. Love comes to Marion, ardent, burning love; her quiet untroubled summer is over. The leaves are touched with gold, but it is not yet Autumn; there is a brilliance in these late flowers that mocks the other blossoms of the year. And yet there is an anguish, too, a bitterness. Through it all she is haunted by the vision of Cherry. How can Cherry live so lightly—love so lightly? Be one thing to-day and another to-morrow? Is she evil, is she a ‘wanton,’ or just a child, or just a young creature helpless because there has never been anyone to help her? Marion cannot decide, but it is as though Cherry has stolen her peace of mind and will not say where she has hidden it away, and Marion is too proud to ask. And in some strange way it is because of Cherry that Marion denies Nigel when he asks her to prove her love. Then begins her real agony. She has never known what it was to love ‘like this.’ How could she have known. It is September love—the late love that women are supposed to long for and to dread. And when her misery is at its height, Nigel comes to tea and she offers him one of the fatal cigarettes.
[87] ‘Hullo!’ he cried in a puzzled way. ‘Do you smoke old Two-toed-Twins?’
It is Cherry’s name for them. When Marion recovers from this final shock, she begins, as it were, to step back into her frame. She decides, after ‘a frenzy of jealousy,’ that Cherry and Nigel are meant for each other, and it is only through her recovered sympathy and understanding that they are saved from drifting apart.
‘So marriage will be very difficult for you, and it’s only if you try hard to be considerate, and find your happiness in Nigel’s happiness, that the marriage will succeed….’
These are among her final words, and we feel they are just what she would have spoken before she stepped out of her frame. They are the words of advice given by the Portrait of a Lady, ætat. thirty-eight, blond, beautiful, and with enough air of mystery to invite confidences…. In her frame she could not be more convincing, but out of it—do such ladies ever escape? Do they not rather step into other frames? Portrait of a Lady in Love, Portrait of a Jealous Lady—and then a whole succession of ‘problem’ portraits: Nigel lighting a Two-toed-Twin cigarette with Marion looking on, and Howard and Cherry embracing in the wood with Marion looking through the leaves. They are most carefully, most conscientiously painted, but we are not held. What has happened to Marion, to Nigel, Cherry and Howard? Nothing. They have weathered the storm, and dawn finds them back again in the same harbour from which they put out—none the worse or the better for their mock voyage. We cannot help recalling the words of an old-fashioned Music Professor: ‘My child, leave the “expression” out, you are playing a study. One does not put “expression” into studies.’ Is it possible that Mr. Swinnerton even ever so slightly agrees with him—or would like to agree with him? And what do we mean [88] exactly by that word ‘expression’? Can we afford to leave it out of a page, of a paragraph—after Tchehov?
(October 10, 1919.)
Poor Relations — By Compton Mackenzie
Time and Eternity — By Gilbert Cannan
Why is it those favoured few whose privilege it is to be invited, like fairies, to pronounce a blessing or a curse upon the new novel are invariably condescending and even a trifle contemptuous if the babe be a smiling babe? There are times, indeed, when from their manner one would imagine they half-suspected the innocent radiant creature of being the result of a youthful folly,—a love child. And though, of course, as broad-minded men of the world, they can excuse—nevertheless: ‘Now that you have had your little flutter we hope that you will settle down and produce something serious.’
To be taken seriously in England a novelist must be serious. Poets may be as gay as they please, story-tellers (especially as nobody will publish short stories) as light-hearted as they wish, but if a young man desires to be told (and who does not?) that he is in the front rank, the head of, leading, far outstepping, immeasurably in advance of, all other novelists of the day, he must be prepared to father fiends hid in clouds.
Perhaps another reason for the cool reception of the novel that is not serious is that English people, as a whole, would a great deal rather feel interested, critical, moved and excited than amused. A really serious novel by a brilliant young man flatters them almost as greatly as if that brilliant young man were to appear before them and to beg them to listen to the story of his life. They feel he presupposes them to possess powers of sympathy and of [89] discernment so extraordinary that it would be ridiculous and below their mutual dignity to waste his time and theirs upon anything that did not call those powers into action. This is very gratifying, but it does not contribute to the gaiety of letters. May we never be amused in our own day? Must we always turn to those words which have been blessed by time or are come from France? We confess to moments when we long to find ourselves at a feast or at a fairing instead of accompanying our young Hamlet to the graveyard and watching and listening while he picks up his first skull and wonders at it….
A glance at the press opinions published at the back of Mr. Mackenzie’s latest novel suffices to show the position he occupies among these, our young masters. Each new book of his has provoked his literary godfathers to a fresh shower of blessings, a heavier rain of gifts. From the very first, they recognized him as one of the young men who were going to count, and nobly has he repaid that recognition, passing from strength to strength, from intensity to intensity until with his adventures of Sylvia Scarlett he reached the pitch of high seriousness they had prophesied he should.
But instead of remaining there, instead of preparing for an even sterner climb, he has descended from his cloudy, thunderous eminence into a valley where we hope he may be tempted to linger. Here, to our thinking, is his proper climate, and here he has every appearance of being most admirably at home; and his enjoyment of the scene is so evident that we are inclined to hope he does not look upon it as a mere picnic ground, a place of refreshment from which he will turn now that the holiday is over.
‘Poor Relations’ is an account of the dreadful sufferings that were put upon Mr. John Touchwood, the highly successful playwright, by his highly unsuccessful family. He was a bachelor and he was family-ridden. By nature he was highly romantic, sentimental, over-generous and over-sensitive, and liable on the slightest provocation to ‘rosify’ events and persons. This rosification, until he [90] met Miss Hamilton, had prevented him from ever looking upon his relatives with a critical eye. It wasn’t enough that Mama was Mama, Edith was Edith, and even Hugh was Hugh. But that calm, self-possessed young woman sitting opposite to them in the saloon of the Murmania, by a chance remark to her travelling companion made him see them, just for one moment, as they really were. He had barely finished reading ‘five delightful letters, really, every one of them full of good wishes and cordial affection’; but after her ‘I’ve never been a poor relation yet, and I don’t intend to start now,’ he read them through again, and this time they were the letters, the unmistakable letters, of poor relations.
John had a house in Hampstead where he was completely looked after and bullied in a mild but insistent way by his housekeeper, Mrs. Worfolk. He had another, a country house ‘kept’ for him by Mama and his widowed sister, Hilda, and Hilda’s dear little boy, Harold. What he wished to do, upon his return from America, was to divide his time between his two houses and write an extraordinarily fine play on the subject of Joan of Arc. But he had no time to divide. He only had a family—determined in their several ways to get out of him all there was to be got, and had it not been for Miss Hamilton’s remark, we see no reason why he should not have been the innocent and half-willing victim. She saved him. She becomes his confidential secretary and, at the happy ending, his wife. But what he endured before that was reached makes the most excellent and amusing reading. The Touchwood family is one of those detestable, fascinating families that we cannot have enough of.
From the moment they are seated round the dining-room table—
at the head of which John took his rightful place; opposite to him, placid as an untouched pudding, sat Grandmamma. Laurence said grace without being invited, after standing up for a moment with an [91] expression of pained interrogation. Edith accompanied his words by making with her forefinger and thumb a minute cruciform incision between two of the bones of her stays…. Harold flashed his spectacles upon every dish in turn….
we are held—and especially by Harold. He is, perhaps, the most unpleasant little boy imaginable; but, at this safe distance, he is a joy. We cannot bear to part with him. When he is not there, like children at a pantomime, we long to know when he is coming on again, with his questions and his information and his spectacles, and his lantern that he loses control of, and flashes in the face of everybody.
Very different is Mr. Cannan’s little book with the big name. Could it be called ‘serious’ even by his most patient admirers? Yet we dare to say it would be hard to find a book more wanting in a sense of humour. The hero is ‘as usual.’ He is Mr. Cannan’s same young man, who is on the point of saving England, of bringing back the times of Shakespeare and Fielding, of killing off the old and giving the young the government of everything and the run of the Italian restaurants in Soho. Like his twin brother in ‘Pink Roses,’ this new hero avoids the war, but his reasons are more fully given. He is saving himself; he is waiting for his soul to burn its way out ‘in a clear flame that will not be denied,’ when he will, as his friend tells him, ‘turn the stream of life back into its course.’ This young man’s particular time of waiting is passed between what we might call a looking-glass parade, a love affair, and conversations with a Russian.
It is a habit with dentists who wish to put young patients at their ease to say to them, as they ‘open wide,’ ‘I can see what you have had for your breakfast.’ There is nothing in ‘Time and Eternity’ to prevent Mr. Cannan’s public from making the same remark once again.
(October 17, 1919.)
[92] The Young Physician — By F. Brett Young
How do you write your novels? It is a question we are often on the point of putting to novelists, and then we remember that it is the question above all others that authors dislike answering. Why is this? They look into the void, they are, beyond words, vague. Would they have us believe that their books spring, fully bound, out of their heads, or that they are visited by angels? Yet we live in an age of experiment, when the next novel may be unlike any novel that has been published before; when writers are seeking after new forms in which to express something more subtle, more complex, ‘nearer’ the truth; when a few of them feel that perhaps after all prose is an almost undiscovered medium and that there are extraordinary, thrilling possibilities….
Never was there a moment when the question was more fascinating. How do you write your novels? Do you have a definite plan before you begin? Do you know exactly what is going to happen and would it be possible for anything else to happen instead? And do you think a plot is necessary? And do you really write all you know, or do you still hold back a little, just a little … and why?
It is that last question that we should like, with all respect, to put to Mr. Young. His new novel ‘The Young Physician’ is the life history of Edwin Ingelby from the age of about fifteen until he is ‘grown up.’ The early part is yet another description of life at a public school—the miserable arrival of the new boy, interview with the miserly, cynical Head, ragging in the ‘dorm.’ at night, secret biscuit eating, cricket matches, ‘footer,’ ‘meaty bits’ out of the Bible, discussion of the facts of life, discovery of impurity among the boys, and the whole school assembled before the irate Head—we know, we [93] dreadfully know it all. Nor does the ‘spirit’ of Mr. Young’s account differ from the ‘spirit’ of all those other accounts.
The next week was the most sensational that had ever shaken the placid life of St. Luke’s. The fall of Griffin was no startling matter—deliberately he had been asking for it and the escapade of the fair in race week was no more than a crowning glory. Still it was an impressive affair. Immediately after breakfast … it was whispered that Griffin had been sent to the infectious ward of the sanatorium, which was always devoted, by reason of its size, rather than any conscious attempt at symbolism, to the isolation of moral leprosy….
Here is the peculiar note of enthusiasm—the ‘Boy’s Own’ note with which we have become so familiar. Nevertheless St. Luke’s is not all the world to Edwin; he arrives loving his mother, and his love for her, instead of changing as a normal boy’s should into a love of cricket bats and ‘strawberry specials,’ grows and deepens into a childish adoration.
In his account of the relations between these two Mr. Young carries us far away from the public school world. Edwin at school, in spite of his love of literature, his passion for historical dreaming and the fact that he cares more for poetry than games, is no more individual than those other school heroes. He follows in their steps, indeed, is bullied like them, comes to his own like them, and is in and out of favour with now the masters, now the boys. But at home, we begin to see an extremely sensitive, loving, imaginative little boy. His mother is a little delicate creature living on dreams and the love of flowers and music, but she feels her hold on life is frail, and unconsciously, imagining that she is the protecting one, she turns to her only child to save her. No child should be made to bear the subtle, difficult, derided emotions of pitying love.
[94] ‘Oh, Mother, why can’t I carry you?’ he cries. He does carry her and she clings, telling him of her dreams and of how unhappy she has been and how he is her baby.
Then, with her death and burial, the chapters telling of their love seem to fall away as the school chapters did. They break, like the two halves of a bud and are shrivelled and forgotten before the open flower. What was the need of them? Have they helped us in the least to understand the boy who goes home to find his perfect little mother dying? No. Reading these chapters, we know all that has gone before; this Edwin is not different from the Edwin with his first tuck box, he is the same, but realized, seen, felt and given. It is at this moment that he comes to life, and it is not without a thrill of excitement that we read on. But with the very first words of the new chapter the thrill subsides:
From this emotional maelstrom the current of Edwin’s life flowed into a strange peace.
‘Emotional maelstrom’—this is very cold water indeed for an author to fling at his little hero, and it does not take us long to discover that however refreshed he may be he is again, in the reader’s eye, a trifle blurred. And though, in the latter half of the book, when he is studying to be a doctor, there are occasional, brilliant glimpses of that beautifully realized little boy, they are never prolonged and they are always followed by a fresh douche. Each time that Edwin feels deeply and is overcome, as youth is overcome, by the unimaginable mystery of life, the author, instead of telling us all he knows (and we feel that he does know), still holds back, or excuses, the emotional maelstrom. Added to this, he has a way of interrupting our vision of his hero by causing other characters to cross his path. We are not referring of course to those with whom he comes into real contact, to those who have something to give him that increases his knowledge of life, but to others—why are they there?—who pass in front of the camera, as it were, for the sake of passing. And finally [95] there is his love affair with a frail delicate girl who awakens that tender protective love in him that he felt for his mother. Like his mother ‘she is little and perfect and beautiful’ and he must defend her, he must carry her away out of the ugly world. Almost, that early glow returns, but this time the douche is heavy and final. His love ends in a fight with an old enemy of his schooldays whom he knows to be diseased and whom he tracks down into Rosie’s bedroom. And Mr. Young leaves him, having signed on as ship’s doctor, facing the open seas….
Readable, yes, eminently readable—readable to a fault. If only Mr. Young could forget the impatient public and let himself be carried away into places where he thinks they do not care to follow!
(October 24, 1919.)
Saint’s Progress — By John Galsworthy
So there is a ‘new school’ of fiction after all! We had come to believe that the phrase ‘to belong to the new school’ had entirely lost its face-meaning, and was nothing but a despairing, lift-of-the-eyebrow joke between the critic and his public, a ‘Heaven knows what the young man or the young woman is driving at, I certainly don’t, and I defy you to.’ But no. These wandering students have their roof-tree and their bell. They are a definite body enough for Mr. John Galsworthy to delay his easy progress in the well-sprung carriage on what we might call the early afternoon of his journey, for as long as it takes him to give them a good beating.
But while we are all gratitude to Mr. Galsworthy for putting us out of our doubts by conducting us to the positively resounding portals, we cannot help feeling it is over-severe on his part so to thrust the whole school under the stick….
[96] When once in a while some literary work of the new school came their way, with its self-conscious exhortations to complete self-consciousness, its doctrine of pure and utter selfishness, or of a hopelessly self-conscious unselfishness, with the querulous and thin-blooded passionateness of its young heroes and heroines, bent on nothing but realizing their unrealizable self through a sort of brain-spun arrogance and sexuality.
Even when we take into account the lively sense of responsibility which a famous and elder author must feel towards the new generation, these are formidable blows, and we are at a loss to call to mind the names of those works, numerous and noteworthy enough to form a new school, which have provoked them. It is certain, however, that Mr. Galsworthy would not have adopted these Draconian methods were he not confident that nothing less would answer. Alas! then, it would seem that we have discovered the new school only to cry ‘Hail and farewell’ to it—only to turn aside, with a shudder, to the old school for our consolation and reward.
The hero of Mr. Galsworthy’s new novel is a clergyman, the Rev. Edward Pierson. Let us imagine him seated at his little piano, for his life is divided between love of music and religion. On either side of him stands a daughter. Gratian, the elder, turns from her father to a dark, downright, shrewd doctor of a husband with a passion for argument; Nollie, aged eighteen, leans over a perambulator containing a war-baby—her left hand, shamelessly and proudly uncovered, wears no ring. A dark, lean, travelled Englishman, with a game leg (caused by the war), looks towards Nollie and longs, but there is a woman between them, bent on distracting his attention. Leila (Delilah, as Nollie calls her), in a black silk gown such as Malay women wear, holds up her white arms and presses a gardenia against Jimmy Fort’s mouth. She is forty-four, with touched-up hair, and reddened lips, and she is making her last bid for love. Then we have a couple, [97] Aunt Thirza and Uncle Bob—Aunt Thirza in a lilac-coloured gown,
like a painting of ‘Goodness’ by an old master, restored by Kate Greenaway…. Her inexpugnable tranquillity, unsentimental tenderness, matter-of-fact busyness, together with the dew in her eyes, had been proof against twenty-three years of life on a tea plantation….
—Uncle Bob, who
grew like a cork tree, and acted like a sturdy and well-natured dog. His griefs, angers and enjoyments were simple as a child’s, or as his somewhat noisy slumbers. They were a notably well-suited couple.
Further off there stands a Belgian refugee, a painter, in a broad-brimmed slouch hat and ‘a black stock and seemingly no collar.’ He, too, gazes admiringly and sadly at Nollie. Then, compassing them all about, there is
a ghastly company of faces; faces he had thought friendly, of good men and women whom he knew, yet at that moment did not know, all gathered round Noel with fingers pointing at her.
They are Edward Pierson’s parishioners. Two more figures and the stage is complete. Upon a back cloth, leading his men, the boy-father of the war-baby spins round, shot through and through; and up in the air, fifteen years away, there floats the sweet vision of Edward Pierson’s dead wife. He and not his daughter is the central figure of the book, the ‘saint’ whose pitiful progress Mr. Galsworthy traces. Sincere, sensitive, wistful, dreamy, emotional, we meet him first at Bob and Thirza’s country house, where he is enjoying a well-earned holiday. Nollie is there, too, and ‘a handsome boy with a little golden down on the upper lip of his sunny, red-cheeked face.’ Even then, when her innocence is little short of prodigious, when she might almost be eighteen months old rather than eighteen years—
[98] ‘Daddy, your nose is burnt!’
‘My dear, I know.’
‘I can give you some white stuff for it. You have to sleep with it on all night. Uncle and Auntie both use it.’
‘Nollie!’
‘Well, Eve says so …’
—he is distressed for her; he feels she has become ‘a great responsibility’ and sighs that his dear wife is not there to help him. Judge then how his distress passes to dismay when she tells him she ‘can’t afford to wait, she “must” marry the young man.’ He has barely signified his disapproval when the elder daughter Gratian telegraphs him to come to her; her husband is desperately ill. He arrives home, and immediately his daughter informs him, in the room where her husband lies between life and death, that she no longer believes in immortality, no longer believes in God. This is a frightful blow to him. Three days later, the husband, out of danger, challenges him ‘to show me where there’s any sign of altruistic pity, except in man,’ and, after a most painful fight,
… going to the little piano in the corner, he opened it, and began playing the hymn. He played it softly on the shabby keys of his thirty-year-old friend, which had been with him since college days, and sang it softly in his worn voice….
On page 19, when Edward Pierson is still in the country, Mr. Galsworthy describes his visit to a church—how
it was so long since he had been preached to, so long since he had had a rest! The words came forth, dropped on his forehead, penetrated, met something which absorbed them, and disappeared.
At the time, these words seemed to us remarkable in themselves, but a closer acquaintance with the padre’s life immeasurably heightens their significance. Those [99] words dropping, penetrating, being absorbed, disappearing—must have been a rare treat to him. For it seems that never again throughout the book do they do aught but wound him, stab him, perplex him, or grievously upset and bewilder him, and never again is he preached to; it is he only who does the preaching. Always on the threshold of his lips there trembles a ‘Let us pray.’ What was his life indeed but one long shower of arrows, into which he stepped, bravely, but with ever the wistful thought: ‘Ah, if only I had my dear wife with me now!’ Indeed, if he were not so tragic we would say he is like a man who has lost a beloved umbrella fifteen years ago and counts it sin to buy another.
But with Noel’s baby the air becomes too thick. He feels it his duty to have the perambulator in his hall, but the parishioners will not bear it. And he is forced to resign.
The saint’s progress is over. We see the stage slowly darken. All the other actors are gone. The temptress has returned to South Africa; Gratian and her husband, happy undisturbed pragmatists, are at work to improve this world. Nollie, even though she has, as her family so gracefully put it, ‘burnt her wing,’ is married to Jimmy Fort; Uncle Bob and Aunt Thirza are—but why need we go any further? The stage is empty. The stage—the stage … the actors are gone….
(October 31, 1919.)