vi
What may profitably be compared in Mr. Conrad’s acknowledged masterpiece and Miss Sackville-West’s dramatic novel is the identity of method and art. I say “identity” without any hesitation, for in both cases I think the artist has achieved a proportionately impressive and living and beautiful result. As to method, the reader will observe for himself that either novel might have been written by either author. In each case the actual knowledge of a totally foreign country is perhaps the same, and in neither case is it very great or very important. Again, in each case, the imaginative creation is on a plane so much above the level attained in other (and very excellent) novels that the book must definitely be set in a class apart. One accounts for the intense imaginative insight of The Old Wives’ Tale and My Antonia (to choose two especially fine examples) by saying that, after all, both Arnold Bennett and Willa Cather had the immeasurable aid of childhood’s unblunted perceptiveness; and in so partially accounting for the sheer fact, one does quite rightly. But neither memory nor the deepest well of sympathy serves to explain Nostromo and Challenge; in these two novels the imagination had to create something de novo and actively body it forth; memories, hearsay, would be an actual interference and the existence of an outer world a positive interruption. They are both novels of a perfectly valid idea recreated in terms of the subconscious personality. If that is too cloudy an explanation I will ask you to think of the subconscious mind as a happily benevolent oyster, of the germ-idea as an infinitesimal particle of irritant sand, and of the accomplished story as the resulting pearl. It is as near as I can come to conveying what I mean ... and know to be at least subjectively true.
Abandoning this difficult region and ascending to the surface on which most art and literary method lies, the comparison becomes so easy that one feels superfluous in making it. Have we not the same complexity of persons presented in an intimate relation to each other and composing a little world, complete socially, politically and in their attitudes; so that we can perfectly conceive them in any set of circumstances? Have we not also an atmosphere resulting from a multitude of impalpable small touches? Is not the effect in each case more exact than any impression to be derived from personal familiarity with either South America or Greece? Is not the same impersonal viewpoint present? the same astringent humour in evidence in its application to the incongruities of the life presented? In both cases the avoidance of any expression of emotion, the final austerity of the highest art, exercises an effect out of all predictable proportion on the emotions of the reader. He is led to feel amusement, ridicule, sympathy, indignation, dismay, horror and grief; because never is it intimated to him that it is his duty to feel any of these things.
vii
The new novel, Grey Wethers, taking its name from those ancient sacrificial stones of the Druids which are the symbols of the story, traces back in substance to Miss Sackville-West’s Heritage, but is free from the faults of construction which made her first novel so unsatisfactory. The fineness of her hand upon this more familiar material is the delicate reward for her incessant painstaking. She is not a person to rest satisfied, but an artist. An artist....
“What was the promise of that mediocre ease beside the certainty of these exquisite privations?” So Chase questioned himself, in Miss Sackville-West’s story of The Heir. “What was that drudgery beside this beauty, this pride, this Quixotism?” There is only one answer. If you would be an artist you do not even bother with the answer. But your heart leaps.
Books by V. Sackville-West
Poems of West and East [in England]
1921 Orchard and Vineyard [in England]
1918 Heritage
1920 The Dragon in Shallow Waters
1923 Knole and the Sackvilles
1923 Challenge [withdrawn in England prior to
publication, 1920]
1923 Grey Wethers
1924 The Heir and Other Stories
Sources on V. Sackville-West
Knole and the Sackvilles, generally, and also pages
11, 17, 68, 82, 83, 219 and 220
Who’s Who [in England]
Private Information