Mr. Galsworthy's Saint's Progress suffers less from insufficient documentation. His heroine Noel, with her short hair, is the daughter of a clergyman, and follows the course gloomily foretold for so many young girls during the war-period to the predestined end of bearing a war-baby. She and her sister Gratian are forced by the pressure of events to think and act for themselves. Gratian, safely married to a doctor, delivers herself as follows:
"Dad," said Gratian suddenly, "we can only find out for ourselves, even if we do singe our wings in doing it. We've been reading James's Pragmatism. George says the only chapter that's important is missing—the one on ethics, to show that what we do is not wrong till it's proved wrong by the result. I suppose he was afraid to deliver that lecture."
But, while Mr. Galsworthy is much superior to Mrs. Ward in the accuracy of his information, he can hardly be said to be superior to her in the justice and clearness of his presentation. The traits of his persons are correctly observed and generalised, but they are not shown through the medium of living individuals. We feel of Noel that many girls of such a disposition found themselves in such circumstances and behaved thus; and so far, regarded as a sociological study, the book is deserving of praise. But what we never feel is that the individual girl, Noel, ever existed; and by the deficiency it is condemned as a novel. This book will be a serious disappointment to those who imagined from Five Tales that Mr. Galsworthy had recovered the original freshness of his talent and was about to begin a new and a sincerer period.
But perhaps the desire to depict, and to comment on, phenomena so fresh and living in the mind as these, which has been fatal to experienced craftsmen of the order of Mrs. Ward and Mr. Galsworthy, is one which will ruin any novel in which it is attempted. Miss Romer Wilson has not the experience of either; but as her first book, Martin Schuler, demonstrated, she has really extraordinary natural gifts. These gifts are still obvious in her second book, which is nevertheless disappointing and all but a complete failure. It describes a circle of non-combatants during the last year of the war, young people, of whom Mrs. Ward has hardly heard, who sway between cynical disgust with the world around them and cynical disgust with their own natures. No man, it has been wisely said, is uninteresting, and these persons, regarded from a sane and tolerantly humorous point of view, might have been the theme for a good book. But since the thoughts, or actions, the manners through which they manifest themselves not being genuine or spontaneous, are important neither for good nor evil, the method of treating them seriously results in making them appear thin and tedious. Affectations, except in the rare event of their producing serious consequences, are a topic only for satire; and here the loves of Josephine and Sebastian, of James Blanchard and Susan and Amaryllis, are expressed purely by affectations, which overlie and conceal whatever genuine feelings these persons may have possessed. This type has had in recent years a curious attraction for young novelists, who have as a result produced many books which are not worthy of attention. But the author of Martin Schuler must sin deeply before we can refuse to read any book of hers, however unwillingly we may persevere in it. And even here her special qualities are altogether beyond mistake. She can still, even in this dreary and pointless tale of people we should prefer not to meet, astonish us with vivid and enchanting fragments of pictorial beauty. A couple of these passages, which are all that redeems the book from dullness, may be given as specimens:
... At the turn of the night it began to rain, and at daybreak the whole country was grey with driving rain, which spluttered against the bedroom window and beat upon the thatch. The noisy sparrows under the eaves shook themselves angrily and fluttered up and down in the garden after worms. The tom cat, who had been out all night, gathered himself up on the doorstep and brooded there with one eye on the sparrows, waiting for the door to be opened. The draught under the door made his paws cold, so he blew himself out and crouched down with his paws folded up underneath him. He was angry and tired, and his fur was covered with minute drops of water that in places had penetrated to his skin, but he sat there patiently dosing and dreaming for two hours until half-past eight, when the bolts were drawn. At the sound of the bolts being shot back he at once stood up and mewed, and the door was hardly opened before he ran into the kitchen, where a stick fire roared in the grate and a frying-pan gave out an odour of frying fat.
... The people came out of the house door, mysterious in the fading light like a procession of Boccaccio's women and a clerk of the Decameron seen through the romantic distance of seven hundred years. They lit the candles in the dark garden-room and sat down as if waiting for somebody to begin a story. Overhead the blue sky gleamed through the gathering darkness, and in the west a rosy glow spread up behind the delicate aspens and maples and acacias of the little plantation above the yew garden. Up in the mazy blue sky the transparent half moon and a few bright planets gleamed beneath the outermost heavens, where faint white constellations began to appear as the darkness quickly gathered upon the earth.
We do not quote these descriptive passages as proving Miss Wilson's aptitude for the novelist's multifarious task. They represent only one of the many gifts of which she must dispose; and they are themselves in several details open to criticism. They do moreover represent almost everything in this book which can be distinguished for commendation. They suggest, however, that Miss Wilson possesses one of the most important gifts of the novelists, namely, a sense of the scene; and it remains for time to show whether she can imagine persons and a situation worthy of her background.
It is a relief to recede from the tangled epoch, which has spoilt and hindered all these writers, into the seventeenth century in France. Miss Mirrlees has written, not a wholly satisfactory or very agreeable, but a very strange book, one far removed from the historical romance of commerce. She has combined what appears to be a close knowledge of her period, of the time of the Jansenists, the Précieuses, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry, with a desire to study a curious case of mental pathology. Madeleine, her heroine, is a provincial girl who removes to Paris with her family and is consumed by an intense longing to enter that fantastic circle of elegance and galanterie which revolved round Mademoiselle de Scudéry and was depicted by her in Le Grand Cyrus. But her awkward shyness forbade that this longing should ever be satisfied; and when she sought to pacify it by the familiar device of the "endless story," she exacerbated it into madness. This is a brief and inadequate account of a most unusual composition, but it will serve to show how Miss Mirrlees has loaded the historical novel with a heavier freight than that ornamental craft is accustomed to carry. But she has not developed either the psychology or the descriptive detail at the expense of the other. She dissects Madeleine's mind with almost morbid closeness and makes of it a terrifying spectacle, but at the same time she has contrived to make her setting in time and place convincing. Her picture of mind and manners may or may not be strictly accurate; but it is certainly not conventional, it is original, it bites. There are certain crudities apparent both in the style and in the construction of the book, as well as in the choice and development of subject; but it will be very interesting to see the next production of a mind so unusual.
Miss Clemence Dane's Legend touches Miss Mirrlees' work fleetingly at one point. It too describes a literary "circle," dominated by women, of the sort which draws weaker characters into it and causes them to deteriorate. But it interests not so much as a study of this particular phenomenon as in that it is an extraordinary attempt, the only one among these books, to carry on the history of the novel, to give that form a new task, to enlarge its range and its adaptabilities. It consists of one long conversation; and the principal character, Madala Grey, makes no appearance, unless the regrettable introduction of her ghost towards the end be counted as such. Madala is a woman-novelist who has contracted what seems to her friends an inexplicable marriage with a dull country doctor. She is in child-bed; and her circle meets to await news, hears of her death, and discusses her. Their views, all mistaken, are reported by the one person present who had never seen her and who deduces the true and simple explanation—that she was actually in love with her husband. This is, it may be objected, merely jumping through a series of hoops; and in a sense the objection has its justification. For, when the story should reach its climax, when Madala herself begins to emerge from the mists of misjudgment and misinterpretation, she is revealed as being only a lay figure. This does not mean that Miss Dane's singular device in the end misses its aim. On the contrary she accomplishes what she set out to do with perfect precision. Nevertheless, the fact remains that she has locked in a very complicated cabinet, and thence extracted again by very subtle means, not a living woman but a doll. Hence her book is not the masterpiece it might have been. But we are almost brought to overlook this fact by the amazing skill with which she manages her invention; and her jumping through hoops, whether it be regarded as an unrelated exhibition of agility or as an experiment in a new method of progress, deserves all attention even though it leads only to disappointment at the end. Miss Dane's first novel, Regiment of Women, was much praised not long ago; her second, First the Blade, did not receive so much notice. This reveals in her originality, daring and ingenuity which could hardly have been predicted from her earlier work; and there is no doubt that it will be widely discussed, since it is in fact rare for any really remarkable display of these qualities to miss its reward. But Miss Dane has yet some distance to advance if she is to do more than win fame as a conjuror or open up paths for other novelists. For an artist capable of so distinguished a conception her style is strangely flat and undistinguished; and the introduction of some very bad and banal passages from the works of Madala Grey is a curious lapse of tact.
Mr. John Cournos's The Mask, which is perhaps the most satisfactory of all these books, though it is not so dazzling and exciting as Legend, is one which has very little to say to the development of the novel. We generally reckon it impertinent to see in any book not avowed as such the autobiography of the author; but in this story of a Jewish boy in Russia and America, without knowing anything of Mr. Cournos, we are forced to make the inference. Its tone and flavour are those of autobiography; and its softened reminiscences of things not always pleasant give it its peculiar charm. It reveals, at all events, more than most novels, a temperament; and this temperament, whatever turn the story may take, is always agreeable and gracious. Vanya Gombarov, the little boy, was brought up in Russia by a stepfather, who wasted all his money in mechanical researches and was obliged to emigrate with his family to America. Here Vanya added to the family income by selling papers, and in other ways, and saw many horrible things. The family experienced many misfortunes; and at the end Mr. Cournos abruptly leaves it moving from one house to another. We have here no pyrotechnics of construction; nor does such a book offer any opportunities for them to the author. But he is able to show himself an artist in the softening veil which his narrative throws over his incidents without in any way distorting them.