Depositing his scrip in the outhouse, the cowherd glanced around:
"Where's Thetis got?" he asked, addressing the small boy, who, brandishing a broken rhubarb leaf, was flitting functionarily about.
"Thetis?... She's," he hopped, "standing in the river."
"What's she standing there for?"
"Nothing."
"... Must I thrash you, Billy Jolly?"
"Oh, don't, David."
"Then answer me quick."
"When the tide flows up from Spadder Bay she pretends it binds her to the sea. Where her sweetheart is. Her b-betrothed.... Away in the glorious tropics."
"'Od! You're a simple one, you are!"
"Me?"
"Aye, you."
"Don't be horrid, David, to me ... you mustn't be. It's bad enough quite without."
"'Od."
Throughout this curious book we have again an attempt at an incoherent and bewildering style, a picture of a world which disintegrates into a thousand pieces as we regard it. It is indeed in some sort that deliquescence of language and thought of which a certain school of French writers once dreamed. But it expresses not a native, if unusual, way of seeing, so much as a perverse, deliberately assumed attitude. Mr. Firbank has clearly talents and ingenuity enough to prevent any nonsense he may write being thrown away as pure nonsense. But it is also clear that his aim is to write nonsense rather than sense and perhaps to put forward under a film of absurdity a certain natural perversity which would not be welcomed if it were more lucidly expressed. He has a certain gift for inconsequence and highly etherealised frivolity; but this may be inextricably connected with his demerits, in which case it would be useless to ask him to change. If he does not, he will remain a curiosity, mildly amusing a few readers, deluding a few into a belief that they have found a super-genius and boring or displeasing the great majority.
These two books taken together suggest an aspect from which it may be profitable to consider Mrs. Hamilton's Full Circle. Neither of them tells a story, in the sense in which the miraculous inventors of the Arabian Nights told stories. Miss Richardson has no "astonishing history" to recount. She rather describes than tells: though her heroine moves chronologically, one has yet the sense rather of movement in space than of movement in time. Mr. Firbank tells some story or other, but it is not possible to discern it under his incessant saltimbanqueries. Mrs. Hamilton tells a definite tale. Certain persons enter into relations, find themselves in a situation, resolve it: there is an introduction, a complication, and a dénouement. It is, however, the story that we miss when we look back on the book. Mrs. Hamilton has observed or imagined certain persons of various characters and, in order to exhibit them, has invented the shocks and clashes between them which carry on her narrative. But, while the persons are clearly observed or imagined, the book suggests that nothing more than invention was used for the bringing forth of the incidents. The writer might easily have been content to describe her characters without showing them in motion. The Quihamptons, Iris Mauldeth and Wilfrid Elstree, are vivid and real, portrayed in the round. We should know them if we met them; and, from their presentation here, we can make such estimates of and guesses about them as we make in ordinary life—they are no less real than that. But in Wilfrid's affair with Bridget Quihampton, in his disappearance and return, in Roger's marriage and destiny, it is impossible not to discern a certain lassitude and want of interest. The incidents are not improbable or ill-drawn; but Mrs. Hamilton cannot have felt very much about them as incidents. Though the people have undoubtedly come to life in her hands, they have not proceeded to do anything of their own initiative; except in one instance, we feel the hand of the author jogging their elbows and ruling their fates. When two of them, when Bridget and Wilfrid, are involved in an emotional situation, the author's interest continues to reveal itself in Bridget and in Wilfrid, not in the situation which the clash of their individualities has produced. A tale need not deal with the marvellous and fantastic, with genies in bottles and young princes transformed into calves, in order to exhibit the special gift of the story-teller. It may concern itself with themes as slight as those of The Spoils of Poynton or What Maisie Knew. But it must at least deal not with isolated personalities but with that which is produced by the fusion, whether in love or hate or some other emotion, of two or more personalities, or by the impact of events on a single personality or more. We do not mean to suggest that Mrs. Hamilton's novel is deficient in this essential: we mean only that on this side of her work there are traces of what appeared to us to be lack of interest, even traces of boredom. In one situation only, in the subtly and mysteriously hinted conflict between Wilfrid Elstree, the brilliant, untrammelled egoist, and Iris Mauldeth, the pretty girl whose commonplace character is as rigid as iron, are these traces absent; and here the novelist's work is done so exceedingly well as to make the deficiencies of the rest especially noticeable.
Mrs. Beatrice Seymour's novel is also distinguished by one remarkable incident. It is, we are informed, a first work, and as such it deserves praise for its smoothness and competence. But in nine parts out of ten it seems to be the attempt of a quite clever writer to sum up in short space what Mr. Bennett did in the three volumes of the Clayhanger series, and what Mr. Compton Mackenzie has not yet finished doing in the four volumes of the Sylvia and Michael series. It describes, that is to say, the separate childhood and youth of a young man and young woman and then their union, which in this case is illicit and which is terminated by the war. Much of it is a great deal too up-to-date to have any depth. Hilary Sargent is a painter, calls Helena Morden "Deirdre" as soon as he sees her, and, one day when they were together on the Downs, "he read to her things she knew and things she didn't from de la Mare, Drinkwater, Gould, Hodgson, and (most appropriately) Hilaire Belloc. And there was Flecker and Brooke and Frances Cornford and Lady Margaret Sackville; and Dora Sigerson whom Helena loved." No wonder that, as the reader easily foresees, they lost the last train home; they had confused their minds with too many styles, and had far too many books to carry. This kind of modernity is too superficial and too easy of achievement: it is presenting the reader with false coin. For the rest the book has the slickness and the clicking regularity which, though they are by no means common in novelists, cannot be of great interest, except to the subscribers to circulating libraries who are wont to ask for a novel which will enable them to support the tedium of the week-end. But in one chapter Mrs. Seymour surprisingly faces and masters a real and a painful situation—that of a shallow girl who, having rejoiced that her husband at the front enables her to be in the fashion, collapses under the news that he has been made hideous by injuries received in the trenches. This is a thing which has undoubtedly happened; it is unspeakably agonising to contemplate; and, so far as we know, no novelist has hitherto attempted it. But there is no reason why it should not be used for purposes of art if the novelist has the requisite skill and tact and, above all, the requisite courage. Mrs. Seymour looks the basilisk in the eyes and reduces it to her service. The conversation between Helena and Pamela Sand—it occupies less than eight pages—in which the whole affair is begun and ended, projects violently out of the book, makes the rest of it look rather emptier than it really is, and testifies unmistakably to the genuine powers which Mrs. Seymour has not elsewhere employed. One scene does not make a novel, much less a novelist; but one such scene as this in a first book persuades us to look hopefully to Mrs. Seymour's future.
THE CHORUS GIRL AND OTHER STORIES. By Anton Tchehov. Chatto & Windus. 3s. net.
In the title-story of this volume the injured wife of Nikolay Petrovitch Kolpakov calls suddenly at the house of Pasha, a chorus-girl, with whom he is accustomed to spend his time, and Kolpakov, who is there, goes into hiding. He has been ruined by his extravagances and is on the point of being arrested for embezzlement. His wife demands the return of the gifts he has lavished on Pasha, in order that the missing sum may be made up and dishonour averted, but Pasha has had no gifts from him. The wife refuses to believe it, repeats her demand, and then, without altering her attitude of contemptuous hatred, implores and entreats. Pasha at last gives her the presents she has received from more generous admirers. She declares these are not enough and asks for more, and Pasha gives her everything she has. When his wife has gone, Kolpakov comes out of his retirement and, expressing his angry remorse that she should have had to kneel to a "low creature," pushes the girl aside and leaves her. Then
Pasha lay down and began wailing aloud. She was already regretting her things which she had given away so impulsively, and her feelings were hurt. She remembered how three years ago a merchant had beaten her for no sort of reason, and she wailed more loudly than ever.
This synopsis suggests, more accurately than any analysis we could attempt in the space at our disposal, why we should welcome the eighth volume of Mrs. Constance Garnett's admirable rendering of the tales of Tchehov into English. An extended study might discover many traits in this author which would be worthy of observation. There is, for example, the peculiar acuteness of his sense of smell. "The air was full of the smell of freshly scrubbed floors." ... "As I mounted the soft carpeted stairs there was, for some reason, a strong smell of india-rubber" ... a house "was half dark and mysterious and smelt of mushrooms"—these are sentences taken at random from two or three stories in the present volume. A minute examination would reveal other characteristics by which a formal criticism could distinguish Tchehov from other writers of the short story. But it is doubtful whether any study could come nearer to defining the nature of his genius than by naming the qualities which are immediately obvious in The Chorus Girl. He has precision, economy, detachment, and, for all his gloom and squalor, charm also. He stoops as it were from an ineffable height, picks up a situation, describes it in the smallest possible number of words, and lets it fall back into the welter of human lives. It is not likely that any English author will imitate him, nor would it be desirable, but his qualities, if they cannot be learnt, can at least be used to correct excesses. And, apart from that, these eight volumes are a monument of narrative and (for with Mrs. Garnett's translation one can say so much) of style.