In her last novel, “The Poor Man,” Miss Benson's art shows tremendous development. This story is characterisation in the finest sense. Edward, the poor man, as a psychological study, is living, vivid, almost tragically real in the reactions which betray his inherent defects—a poor devil who never gets a chance. Miss Benson preaches no sermon, points no moral, makes no plea. She gives us a slice of life—and gives it relentlessly, but justly. It is the Old Testament justice which visits the iniquity of the father upon the third and fourth generations, and leaves the reader with the congenial task of finishing the sentence by supplying the mercy without which this old world could hardly totter under the weight of this Commandment. The story, however, makes no reference either to eugenics or to religion. The application is for the reader to supply—if he is so inclined. The author is not concerned with “science,” but with art. She does not bore us with a history of Edward's heredity or of his early life. She introduces him to us sitting in Rhoda Romero's room in San Francisco—an unwelcome guest—without throwing light upon his previous existence, except that he had been “shell-shocked” and had experienced three air raids in London.
From his introduction we know Edward as we know an acquaintance, not as we know ourselves. His tragedy is his feeble mentality and still feebler temperament, and the heart of the tragedy is the contrast between his intentions and his acts. Edward always means well. He is not vicious; not lazy. But he is stupid. He wants to be decent; wants to be liked; even wants to work. He is weak, sickly, drinks too much, and there is nothing he knows how to do well. It is as a victim, rather than as an aggressive wrong-doer, that we see him secretly currying favour with school-boys he is supposed to be teaching, and ignoring their insults, selling what belongs to others, and at last robbing a boy of thirteen who has been left alone by his father in a hotel in Pekin, whence Edward has gone in headlong and blind pursuit of Emily, with whom he has become infatuated without even knowing her name. But such is the art of his delineator that one finds oneself almost pitying him when his infatuation climaxes in the declaration from Emily: “Can't you leave me alone? I can't bear you. I couldn't bear to touch you—you poor sickly thing.” It is on this note that the drama ends.
If one were obliged to confine himself to backing one entry in the Fiction Sweepstakes now being run in England (entries limited to women above ten and under forty), he would do well to consider carefully the Stella Benson entry. Many would back Sheila Kaye-Smith, but the expert and seasoned bettor would be likely to find so many characteristics of the plough-horse that he would not waste his money.
Had Rose Macaulay not succumbed to smartness and become enslaved by epigram, her chances would have been excellent. As it is, she attempts to carry too much weight. The committee, the literary critics, have done what they could to lighten it, but “Mystery at Geneva” is her answer.
E. M. Delafield, Clemence Dane, and even G. B. Stern would be selected by many, no doubt. But judged from their record, not on form, they cannot be picked as winners.
The entry that is most likely to get place, if it doesn't win, is the youngest daughter of the late Sir Leslie Stephen, Mrs. Virginia Woolf.
“Mark on the Wall,” her most important story, deals with the flood of thought, conscious and unconscious, when so-called abstraction is facilitated by intent gazing. The hypnotist anæsthetises the consciousness by having the subject gaze at some bright object, she by gazing at a snail. The illusion facilitates thought of the place and of the lives that have been lived there. The richness of the thought stream thus induced gives full play for her facility of expression and capacity for pen pictures.
There is in Mrs. Woolf a note of mysticism, of spirituality which reveals itself in a conscious or unconscious prayer for the elusive truth. This note of itself sets her apart from the realistic woman writers of today. Although often vividly realistic in her form, there is in her work an essence which escapes the bounds of realism. This is most strongly acknowledged in “Monday or Tuesday,” a volume of short stories and sketches. The book takes its name from a little sketch of three hundred and fifty words, for which the only accurate label is “prose poem.” It is a direct illustration of the author's meaning when she makes her hero say, in “The Voyage Out”:
“You ought to write music.... Music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once. In writing it seems to me there's so much scratching on the match-box.”
For prose writing “Monday or Tuesday” is a triumph in the elimination of “scratching on the match-box.” One recognises in it the longing, more or less vaguely felt by all people, but inexpressible by most of them who are not poets, musicians, or artists in form or colour, for some supreme good which she calls truth. The New Psychology would attribute it to the unconscious and call it an ugly name. But Mrs. Woolf does not name it; she merely gives voice to the aspiration welling up from somewhere in people's deeper selves and hovering hauntingly, just out of range but near enough to colour the quality of their thoughts, even when they are occupied with the most trivial and commonplace business of life. They can never elude it, any more than they can long elude the “Hound of Heaven,” but unlike the latter it is not a relentless pursuer, but a lovely, tantalising wraith—always present but never attainable or definable.