These two extracts will serve better than any analysis to explain both the direction and the method of Mr. Pickthall's satire. It has the doubtful merit (in a satire) of being consistently moderate; and Sir Limpidus, who is never quite a figure of truth, also misses ever being quite a figure of fun. Social criticism on these lines may put forward quite adequately the author's point of view; but unless it has some imaginative vigour it cannot be said to justify the form in which it is cast. Mr. Pickthall's book is a presentation, by means of characters instead of by abstract arguments, of certain lines of thought regarding politics, education, and other questions; and in so far it is an essay in the same genre as Miss Stern's novel. Where it differs is in the fact that the lines of thought have remained to the author incomparably more interesting than the means of their presentation. These figures are painted in the flat: they have little imaginative life: and, as a work of creative fiction, the book must be regarded as a failure.
With the remainder of the books on our list, we return to the older tradition of the novel, the tradition which seeks to produce a work of art, the lessons deducible from which (if any) are, roughly, applicable to human nature in general. In this sort, Mrs. Virginia Woolf has written a very extraordinary story. Katharine Hilbery, after much hesitation, engages herself to William Rodney, a precise Civil Servant, who writes plays in verse. He develops doubts of their love simultaneously with hers, and is not sure whether he is not in love with her cousin, Cassandra, as, after some curious experiments in emotionalism, he discovers himself to be. He therefore disengages himself from Katharine and engages himself to Cassandra. Meanwhile Ralph Denham, a brilliant and more vital, if less polished, young man, in love with Katharine, seeing her given to William, proposes to Mary Datchet, who loves him but refuses him. When Katharine is free he proposes to her and is accepted. This story Mrs. Woolf tells in nearly five hundred-and-fifty pages of fairly close print.
The taste for her writing is decidedly an acquired one; and, as we have proved by experiment, it is possible to read some two hundred pages without acquiring it. But when a certain saturation point is reached, a remarkable change takes place in the reader's sensibility; and what before he thought amazingly tedious and thin-spun he then finds delightful—delightful enough for it to be worth while turning back to the beginning and reading again the two hundred pages which wearied him at the first attempt. Mrs. Woolf has indeed proved a truth which undoubtedly exists but which few writers are capable of establishing, namely, that no character, properly ascertained and portrayed, can ever be uninteresting. It is not by vivacity or humour that she maintains the readableness of her innumerable scenes and conversations. Perhaps the most vivacious passage in the book is the description of Cassandra, as she appears in William's memory:
Cassandra Otway had a very fine taste in music, and he had charming recollections of her in a light fantastic attitude, playing the flute in the morning-room at Stogdon House. He recalled with pleasure the amusing way in which her nose, long like all the Otway noses, seemed to extend itself into the flute, as if she were some inimitably graceful species of musical mole. The little picture suggested very happily her melodious and whimsical temperament.
Mrs. Woolf is not a satirist, not even so much as was Jane Austen; and she avoids humour for its own sake, not so much because she is not capable of it as because that is not here her concern. The outstanding quality of her book is its consistent wealth of minute and accurate observation, both of behaviour and of states of mind, by means of which the persons are at length fully revealed. Extracts from work of this sort are unfortunately, as a rule, not very convincing: it is like a liquid which has no colour when it is seen in a tea-spoon and a great deal when it is seen in a bucket. But a specimen may be given. Here Katharine and Rodney, sitting together in silence, are considering for the first time the possibility of breaking their engagement:
She would have spoken, but could not bring herself to ask him for signs of affection which she had no right to claim. The conviction that he was thus strange to her filled her with despondency, and illustrated quite beyond doubt the infinite loneliness of human beings. She had never felt the truth of this so strongly before. She looked away into the fire; it seemed to her that even physically they were now scarcely within speaking distance, and spiritually there was certainly no human being with whom she could claim comradeship; no dream that satisfied her as she was used to be satisfied; nothing remained in whose reality she could believe, save those abstract ideas—figures, laws, stars, facts, which she could hardly hold to for lack of knowledge and a kind of shame.
When Rodney owned to himself the folly of this prolonged silence and the meanness of such devices, and looked up ready to seek some excuse for a good laugh or opening for a confession, he was disconcerted by what he saw. Katharine seemed equally oblivious of what was bad or of what was good in him. Her expression suggested concentration upon something entirely remote from her surroundings. The carelessness of her attitude seemed to him rather masculine than feminine. His impulse to break up the constraint was chilled, and once more the exasperating sense of his own impotency returned to him. He could not help contrasting Katharine with his vision of the engaging, whimsical Cassandra; Katharine undemonstrative, inconsiderate, silent, and yet so notable that he could never do without her good opinion.
She veered round upon him a moment later, as if, when her train of thought was ended, she became aware of his presence.
This is woven of gossamer threads, and so indeed is the whole novel; but these threads make together a consistent, flexible, and beautiful fabric. There is one further observation that is perhaps worth making. Writers who go so deeply into the minutenesses of psychology and behaviour as Mrs. Woolf commonly tend to obscurity not only in their material but also in their presentation of it. In the pages of this book there is not one thought or one sentence that is not impeccably lucid.
The Power of a Lie, by Mr. Jonas Bojer, a Norwegian author, whose book, The Great Hunger, has already attracted attention, is preceded by an introduction by Sir Hall Caine; and indeed the farmers and peasants with which it deals do a little recall the Manxmen of that writer's early work. But there the suitability of this sponsorship ends; and we must enter a protest against the practice of handicapping a book with a preface by a critic who is evidently incapable of understanding it or of expressing himself intelligently upon it. The story is sufficiently simple. Knut Norby, a wealthy, simple, good-hearted, irascible old farmer, has allowed himself in a weak moment to be cajoled into backing a bill for Wangen, who is an unbalanced, incompetent, and rather unamiable person. Wangen fails; and Norby is reduced to panic terror by the thought of what his wife will say when she hears of his folly. He therefore puts off the moment of confession by speaking so evasively as to give the impression that he denies having signed the bond, and Fru Norby, indignant against the man who has sought to defraud her husband, takes the matter into her own hands and lays a charge of forgery against Wangen. The innocent man, who is guilty enough in other particulars, having brought many persons who trusted him to destitution, is elevated into a condition of excessive self-righteousness by this unjust accusation. Norby struggles for some time to put matters right, but his courage always fails him at the point of confession; and gradually he comes to regard Wangen as a wicked man and as the tool of unscrupulous persons. Wangen, always weak and shifty, at length forges a letter to prove his case, which he cannot do otherwise, as the only witness to the signature is dead. His forgery is detected, and he is sentenced to a year's hard labour. Meanwhile Norby has argued himself out of the truth and back into the condition of benevolent justice, which is his natural state. The book ends with a banquet given to him by his neighbours to show their sympathy with him in his trials.
On this very remarkable composition Sir Hall Caine has the following observations to make:
This book says, if I do not misunderstand it, that the sense of innocence in an innocent man may be corrupting and debasing; that to prove himself guiltless a man may make himself guilty, and that nearly every good and true impulse of the heart may be whittled away by the suspicion and abuse of the world.
I confess, though I am here to introduce this book to English readers, and do so with gladness and pride, that this is teaching of which I utterly disapprove. It conflicts with all my experience of life to think that a man may commit forgery, as Wangen does, to prove himself innocent of forgery, and that a man may become unselfish, as Norby becomes unselfish, by practising the most selfish duplicity. If I had to believe this I should also have to believe that there is no knowledge of right and wrong in the heart of man, no sense of sin, that conscience is only a juggling fiend, and that the presiding power in the world not only is not God, but is the devil.