A. A. Milne is another name to conjure with among those who love humour and charm, gentleness and a quiet shafting of the human depths. There is his novel, Mr. Pim. Old Mr. Pim, in his gentle way, shuffled into the Mardens’ charming household. Mr. Pim said a few words and went absentmindedly away,—leaving Mr. Marden with the devastating knowledge that his wife was no wife, that her first husband, instead of lying quietly in his grave in Australia, had just landed in England. In short, the Mardens had been living in sin for five years! Then Mr. Pim came back for his forgotten hat and the Marden household was again revolutionised.
Beauty for Ashes, by Joan Sutherland, is a story with a more serious theme. It really raises the question whether a man who has wrongly been named as co-respondent is in honour bound to marry the defendant. The affair of Lady Madge with Lord Desmond was an entirely innocent one, despite what London said. Lady Madge’s husband, wrought upon by shame and anger, began his action for divorce; and Desmond found himself not merely face to face with dishonour but bound by conventional honour for life to a girl with whom he had simply been friendly.
William Rose Benét had been known chiefly as a poet until the publication of his first novel, The First Person Singular. The scene of The First Person Singular shifts between the kinetic panorama of modern New York and the somewhat stultifying quietude of a small Pennsylvania town. A mysterious Mrs. Ventress is the centre of its rapidly unfolding series of peculiar situations. Mrs. Ventress is a puzzle to the townspeople. They believe odd things about her. The particular family in Tupton with which she comes in contact is an eccentric one. The father is a recluse—for reasons. His adopted daughter, Bessie Gedney, is an odd character among young girls in fiction. Dr. Gedney’s real daughter had disappeared years before. Why? What has become of her? This complicates the mystery.
The First Person Singular is a light novel, avowedly without the heavy “significance” and desperately drab realism of many modern novels. And yet it flashes with tragedy and implicates grim spiritual struggle without tearing any passion to tatters. The author’s touch is light, the variety of his characters furnish him much diversion. The amusing side of each situation does not escape him. His style has a certain effervescent quality, but, for all that, the tragic developments of the story are not shirked.
Another treatment of a problem of marriage, a treatment sympathetic but robust, is found in the new novel of F. E. Mills Young, The Stronger Influence. Like Miss Mills Young’s earlier novels, Imprudence and The Almonds of Life, the scene of The Stronger Influence is British Africa. The story is of the choice confronting a girl upon whom two men have a vital claim.
To be somebody is more ethical than to serve somebody. The individual has not only a right but an obligation to sacrifice family entanglements in the cause of a necessary personal independence. This is the attitude expressed in Richard Blaker’s novel, The Voice in the Wilderness. The story centres around the figure of Charles Petrie, popular playwright in London but known in Pelchester merely as a shabby fellow and to his family a singularly sarcastic and annoying father. Sarcasm was Petrie’s one defence against the limp weight that was Mrs. Petrie His children would have been astonished to hear him called a charming man of the world, yet he was. It is probable that he never would have come out into the open to combat if he hadn’t been moved constantly to interfere and save his daughter Cynthia from offering herself as a willing sacrifice to her mother. Richard Blaker is new to America, a novelist of acutely pointed characterisations and careful atmosphere.
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Nêne, the work of an unknown French school teacher, a novel distinguished in France by the award of the Goncourt Prize as the most distinguished French novel of the year 1920, had sold at this writing 400,000 copies in France. Three months after publication, it had sold in this country less than 3,000 copies.
I am glad to say that it was sufficient to draw to the attention of Americans this deplorable discrepancy to arouse interest in the novel. People of so divergent tastes as William Lyon Phelps, Corra Harris, Ralph Connor, Walter Prichard Eaton, Mary Johnston, Dorothy Speare and Richard LeGallienne have been at pains to express the feeling to which Nêne has stirred them. I have not space to quote them all, and so select as typical the comment of Walter Prichard Eaton:
“I read Nêne with great interest, especially because of its relation to Maria Chapdelaine. It seems to me the two books came out most happily together. Maria Chapdelaine gives us the French peasant in the new world, touched with the pioneer spirit, and though close to the soil in constant battle with nature, somehow always master of his fate. Nêne gives us this same racial stock, again close to the soil, but an old-world soil its fathers worked, and the peasant here seems ringed around with those old ghosts, their prejudices and their passions. I have seldom read any book which seemed to me so unerringly to capture the enveloping atmosphere of place and tradition, as it conditions the lives of people, and yet to do it so (apparently) artlessly. This struck me so forcibly that it was not till later I began to realise with a sigh—if one himself is a writer, a sigh of envy—that Nêne has a directness, a simplicity, a principle of internal growth or dramatic life of its own, which, alas! most of us are incapable of attaining.”