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.
3_s._ 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.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
THE LONDON VENTURE. By MICHAEL ARLEN. Heinemann. 4_s._ net.
It is a little hard to know under what classification this book ought
to be considered, whether fiction, biography, or belles-lettres. The
same difficulty has occasionally arisen with the works of Mr. George
Moore. But since the author is alluded to in it by the name which he
acknowledges to be his own, we have decided that it cannot be fiction.
For a reason which has sometimes occurred to the critics of Mr. George
Moore, we beg to be excused from treating it as biography. There
remains nothing but belles-lettres.
And Mr. George Moore's name occurs here very appropriately, for not he,
not even Mr. Max Beerbohm, has written anything so characteristically
Moore-ish as some of these pages. Observe how it is done:
But this letter has seemed strange to me because, perhaps, I shall
never again receive a letter whose writer is dead, and who, when
writing it, dreamt of all material things but death. Were I Oscar
Wilde I might wonder now if Englishwomen who die in America come back
to London; for there is much of London in the letter: "I should like
to be in London to-day--Bloomsbury London, Mayfair London, Chelsea
London, London of the small restaurants and large draughts of wine,
London of the intellectual half-lights, drone of flippant phrases and
racy epigrams, with a thin fog outside." ...
... Out of the silence of two years at last came a letter from her.
I found it when I came in very late one night, and for a long time I
stood in my little hall and examined the Eastern stamp and postmark;
and the writing on the envelope was so exactly the same as on the
last note she had sent me before leaving England that I had to smile
at the idea of Shelmerdene, in the rush of her last pursuit of her
perfect fate, laying in a sufficient store of her own special nibs
to last her for the lifetime she intended to spend abroad; for when
I opened the letter I found that, as I had guessed, she would never
come back to England, saying, "I am a fugitive branch which has at
last found its parent tree.... I have run my perfect fate to earth,
Dikran! more perfect than any dream, more lasting than the most
perfect dream." ...
Here is the very attitude, here the very cadences of the original; and
the adventures are not dissimilar. Now Mr. Moore has acquired his style
by long labour, and it is a little amusing to see the flower of it
culled by a writer who has neither dug nor watered. But Mr. Arlen will
not in so close a discipleship make the best of the talents which the
very closeness of his discipleship shows him to possess. An author who
can copy so exactly the manner of another ought to be able to evolve a
manner of his own; and we look forward to seeing a book in which Mr.
Arlen shall have done this.
IN THE GARRET. By CARL VAN VECHTEN. Knopf.
Mr. Van Vechten is an American critic, rather of the type of the
ingenious Mr. Huneker. He is quite as fluent, not quite so versatile.
No art or aspect of life presents itself to Mr. Huneker as superior
to any other; but Mr. Van Vechten has a great deal more to say about
music than about anything else. He touches the theatre a great deal,
literature a little, and music most of all; and he gulps down greedily
all he touches. One name is as good as another to him and he knows a
great many names of all sorts. "George Moore," he says, apropos of Mr.
Moore's suggestion that _Robinson Crusoe_ ought to be rewritten, "has
rewritten many of his own books. Henry James rewrote all of his novels
and tales that he cared to preserve for the definitive edition. On
the other hand, Ouida believed (and expressed this belief in a paper
published in her _Critical Studies_) that once a book was given to the
public it became a part of life, a part of history, and that its author
had no right to tamper with it." Mr. Ernest Newman likes the operas
of Isaac Albéniz, but Mr. Marliave does not share his enthusiasm. On
two opposite pages we discovered the names of the following persons:
Mr. Cabell, Mr. Arthur Machen, George Sand, M. Maeterlinck, Mr.
Cecil Forsythe, Monet, Leonardo, Homer, Rabelais, Cervantes, Remy de
Gourmont, Dickens, Huysmans, and Mr. Havelock Ellis. This is lively
enough in all conscience, and Mr. Van Vechten is able to keep it up
without flagging and to support it with an equal vivacity of style, as
when he remarks that the art of the musician "deals with clang-tints."
Modern English criticism is sometimes reproached with being a little
too heavy. Here we have a critic so volatile that he bounces like a
child's balloon from the name of one great man to another.
AMONG ITALIAN PEASANTS. By TONY CYRIAX. Collins. 12_s._ 6_d._ net.
The brush rather than the pen is evidently the medium of expression for
Mrs. Tony Cyriax. The pictures in her book convey an infinitely better
impression of the life of the peasant in an Italian mountain-village
than all she says about it in writing, which is rather crude and
colourless. But the pictures are delightful, and are sufficiently
praised in an appreciative Introduction by Mr. Muirhead Bone.
The best chapters in the book are those dealing with the tending of
silkworms in peasant cottages, and the greatly dreaded hailstorm which,
despite the prayers of the priest, religious processions, and the
ringing of church bells, destroys in an hour the labour of months and
brings the villagers to the verge of starvation.
Such a storm as the writer describes will recall vividly to the memory
of any one who has stayed in an Italian hillside village the pathetic
anxiety of the natives when a thunderstorm is brewing. All around
stretch the vineyards, which from dawn till dusk have been the care
of people to whose toil the day's work of an English agricultural
labourer is child's play. Will the hailstones utterly ruin the vines?
If so, the villagers will be faced with semi-starvation, and yet more
bread-winners, in despair, must emigrate to America, that refuge for
the Italian destitute.
Pathetic, too, is an account of weeks of unceasing toil in connection
with the cottage silkworm industry. The _cavalleri_ (as the peasants
call the silkworms), remorseless in their greed for mulberry leaves
and their demands for the right temperature, will keep a whole family
working for them from morning till night.
Here, as given by Mrs. Tony Cyriax, is the result of the labour of one
such household:
"The work from start to finish had covered forty days, and Rosina's
cocoons had weighed fifty-six kilograms ... so Rosina had earned
exactly 224 lire, which is all but £9."
As a record of the hard existence that may be passed in the midst
of Nature's graciousness and beauty _Among Italian Peasants_ is not
without value.
SUSSEX IN BYGONE DAYS: Reminiscences of Nathaniel Paine Blaker,
M.R.C.S. Hove, Combridges. 1919. 5_s._
The recorders of Sussex must have a shelf to themselves by this time,
and there are many reasons for it. Sussex has not only individual
quality, amenity and interest: all counties have them. But it is
accessible, and it is the fashion. Not to go back to Dallaway and his
likes, the best of the moderns are Mr. Lucas and Mr. Halsham, and the
better of them Mr. Lucas, as we think. He has the mellower outlook, a
benevolent, postprandial regard. Mr. Halsham is more pedagogical; he
regrets much, and seldom approves. He cannot praise a landscape without
reminding us how much better it was before old What's-his-name cut down
those trees. Taken at some length--indeed, taken in series--he becomes
tiresome. Nevertheless, he wrote a novel once, called _Kitty Fairhall_,
which contains more of the essence of the Sussex peasant than Mr. Lucas
himself is likely to apprehend.
Mr. Nathaniel Blaker, the latest chronicler, earns a place upon the
shelf the rather because it need only be a little one. Our quarrel
with him would be that it did not ask a larger. He has lived long and
served his county honourably in an honourable profession; but he has
not much to say. That is a pity. He has stored his mind, but cannot
load his page. He remembers mail-coaches, he remembers the ox-teams, he
remembers the days of reaping with the sickle, the foot-high stubbles,
the threshing with a flail. To some of us those memories have a savour
so sharp that, with the wind, one might catch and transfigure it in
words. To Mr. Blaker they are as the primrose was to Mr. Bell, and one
feels that he puts them down rather because that is the kind of thing
one does put down in books of this sort than because they import a
perfume which it is luxury to distil upon the page. Lacking gusto, Mr.
Blaker tantalises his reader. The beautiful names which he strews about
him--Selmesten, Steyning, Hurstpierpoint, Ringmer, Fulking--flicker
like a mirage. He tells us, for example, that Steyning Fair in the
old days "was a scene of great excitement and confusion, and probably
as much iniquity as could be crowded into so small a space." We dare
say so; but we are athirst for the iniquities, and he gives us none
to drink of. One wishes to get Mr. Blaker by the fire with a matured
cigar, and ply him with questions. Gypsies now. Obviously he knows a
great deal about them. He says, "I well recollect, very many years ago,
one rainy afternoon, which prevented them working, watching a family of
gypsies in a barn. I think the family must have consisted of the father
and mother and several children, one daughter nearly grown up, and two
or three acquaintances. They all sat or lay about upon the straw, doing
absolutely nothing, while one or two girls kept singing a peculiarly
plaintive and monotonous but soothing and agreeable tune in a language,
I believe, I did not know, for I could not catch a single word." That
is the sort of thing Mr. Blaker will do with a pen in his hand--give
us the materials of a picture and leave us burning. His "broken hinted
sights" do but sting the mind.
Of course he tells us--he can't help it--some interesting things.
One of them is "a common saying that Sussex girls had such long legs
because they stretched them by pulling them out of the mud." That
must have been in the Weald--but we did not know that feature of
Sussex girls. Cobbett knew, and so do we, that they are remarkable
for their good looks. Mr. Blaker does not say so. We regret his Peter
Bell attitude to life. His best chapters are upon the horse and the
birch, with both of which he is evidently acquainted. "It used to be
considered," he says, "a great joke when a lady's first baby arrived to
send her a carefully packed parcel containing a small birch rod, with a
label, 'To be used when required.'" That is what we want. And, again,
he says that "it was the custom when the cloth was laid for dinner in
the middle of the day, for the cane, which was kept over the mantel ...
to be placed with the carving-knife and steel on papa's right hand."
Excellent. These scraps show what a handsome sack of oddments Mr.
Blaker must have. He should have shaken it more liberally over his book.
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE AFTER ITS DELIVERANCE. By JOHN FINLEY. Chapman &
Hall. 10_s._ net.
Of Mr. Finley's sincerity and enthusiasm there can be no question: of
his taste there is a good deal to be said. Many books have been written
about the Holy Land; but surely none before which deliberately puts
the history and the personages of Palestine into the background of a
picture whose foreground is occupied with the events of the recent
campaign. Mr. Finley has no hesitation in viewing sacred history _sub
specie temporis hodierni_. For him Allenby's battle at Armageddon is
"the beginning of the end of the battle with the Beast." The German is
not, however, only Anti-Christ: he is also Judas. Here are Mr. Finley's
meditations over the Holy City:
I was an ashamed spectator, standing there at the Gethsemane Gate,
feeling that we had been sleeping when we should have been watching,
when we should have been preparing for defence against the German
Judas who had professed devotion to the teachings of Him who spoke
the Sermon on the Mount. Did not the great German Hospice stand most
conspicuously on the Mount, that its pilgrims might dip their bread
in the very sop of the Master's dish? And do not the towers of the
German churches stand out most prominently (and offensively) in the
Inner City?
Most of his book is like that: and if you cannot see history in quite
the startling black-and-white of Mr. Finley's imagination you had
better leave the book unread. Mr. Finley was with the American Red
Cross, and he tells one happy story of himself, which it is only fair
to quote. He was worshipping in the Russian Church of the Ascension on
the Mount of Olives:
A woman of sharp, eager face, as of a zealot, with a grey shawl over
her head, seeing me standing near the door, approached me and said,
in rather sharp voice, "Quelle croix?" I did not at first understand
the import of her inquiry, though I realised that she was putting to
me an all-important question: "Quelle croix?--grecque ou latine?" ...
My answer was "La Croix Rouge."
If the soil of Palestine be favourable for legends, no doubt a tale
will arise of a strange religion whose devotees cross themselves
neither in the Western or Eastern manner, but in some strange, "red"
mode which Mr. Finley's zealot was probably eager to see.
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA. By JOHN GALSWORTHY. Heinemann. 6_s._ net.
Generalisation, which used to be a philosophy, is rapidly becoming
little more than a hobby. During the war it was a hobby savagely or
amiably ridden by those who sought to explain the mentality of the
Allies or the Enemy. Gradually individuals learnt that not every
Belgian was Belgium, nor every German Germany: but for propaganda
purposes we still used great typical figures. It saved thought,
and it flattered either our own pride or that of our friends. The
propagandists' most delicate task was always to explain Great Britain
to the United States of America: and certainly it was a wise thing to
send Mr. Galsworthy across the Atlantic. Surely he, if anyone, might be
able to justify the ways of the country house to Boston and New York,
to Washington and even to Chicago. Here we have his addresses delivered
during 1919 in the United States. In his paper on America and Britain
he takes the line that by words we are saved:
The tie of language is all-powerful--for language is the food
formative of minds. Why a volume could be written on the formation of
character by literary humour alone.
It sounds not unconvincing, until one remembers that French is not the
language of Alsace; that English is spoken by most of the inhabitants
of Ireland; or, to go further back, that the possession of a common
language did not prevent Athens and Sparta from indulging in the
Peloponnesian War.
We like Mr. Galsworthy better when he leaves his generalisations
and tells stories. In the paper "Tallary at Large" he displays that
sweet-naturedness, that mellowed irony which never lapses into satire,
that humour which is always aware that a sense of pity is invaluable in
comedy. Here is the true Galsworthy:
In the fifth year of the war two men sat alone in a railway carriage.
One pale, young, and rather worn, had an unlighted cigarette in his
mouth. The other elderly, prosperous, and of a ruddy countenance,
was smoking a large cigar. The young man, who looked as if his days
were strenuous, took his unlighted cigarette from his mouth, gazed at
it, searched his pockets, and looked at the elderly man, and said,
... "Could you give me a light, sir?" The elderly man regarded him
for a moment, dropped his eyelids, and murmured: "I've no matches."
The young man sighed, mumbled the cigarette on his watering lips,
then said very suddenly: "Perhaps you'll very kindly give me a light
from your cigar, sir." The elderly man moved throughout his body as
if something very sacred had been thrilled within him. "I'd rather
not," he said, "if you don't mind." A quarter of an hour passed,
while the young man's cigarette grew moister, and the elder man's
cigar shorter. Then the latter stirred, took it from under his grey
moustache, looked critically at it, held it out a little way towards
the other with the side which was least burned-down foremost, and
said: "Unless you'd like to take it from the edge."
And there are people who are surprised that the returned soldier
occasionally commits acts of violence.
THOUGHTS IN MIDDLE LIFE. By G. LOCKER LAMPSON. Humphreys. 3_s._ 6_d._
net.
This book is beautifully printed on admirable paper, and is priced very
low. Unfortunately Mr. Locker Lampson has reached middle life without
learning that most platitudes are better unwritten. "No man is a hero
to his own valet, and the same principle may be applied as in part the
cause of our invidious comparisons between the men of yesterday and
those of to-day." "He alone has a right to be called successful who
has led a happy life." Sometimes he will enliven his platitude by a
pleasing derangement of metaphors. "Autobiographies are of little value
in extending the personality of their authors. We may get an occasional
glimpse below the surface, but the waters are generally agitated by all
kinds of subsidiary motives, and the eye cannot pierce them." The one
sentence which explains the author is to be found in the essay _One's
Own Company_: "No man, then, need ever be bored by himself, although he
cannot avoid being bored by others."
DOMUS DOLORIS. By W. COMPTON LEITH. The Bodley Head. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
In the unornamental language, from which even the loftiest intelligence
may extract apt expression for itself, this little book may be called
a collection of thoughts in hospital from a patient's standpoint, and
an impression of the various nurses who attended him. And yet such a
description is unjust and utterly beside the point. The publisher's
note upon the cover tells us that Mr. Leith has "a rare sense of the
value of words and the beauty of phrases," and there is no doubt of it.
But the value to literature and humanity of phrases which are but the
vehicles of their own intrinsic beauty is to be questioned. The whole
essay is precious in the last degree.
"Oblivion flowed up like evening gloom. Life moved with it to the edge
of a great deep; it was drawn over; it floated down and down, wound in
the arms of sleep."
"A faint awareness stole into being, like the grey of morning; then
a sense of movement; but whether it was a coming up and forth, or a
declining, there was no power to tell."
This sort of thing, exquisite as it may be sometimes, constantly
reminds us, however, and with relief, that Henley, with simplicity
and humour, covered the same ground in verse. From time to time an
unpretentious passage comes to us with a shock, and we ask ourselves
again and again, if, as it seems, the writer has opinions to air,
observations about life and death to make, what especial virtue there
is in the high-falutin obscurity of his expression. One of the chief
and most necessary concealments of art lies in a well-simulated
nonchalance to the more obvious kind of purple patch. Here the entire
robe is of purple, though certainty of a royal shade. There were
voices, Mr. Leith tells us on the first page (and it was not until the
fifteenth that we knew where the voices came from), which "kept thought
strained after a meaning." A light strain is no doubt good for thought;
but in reading this book it is not light: and it is hard to say which
strain is the more severe--the student's for meaning or the author's
for effect.
A CHILDHOOD IN BRITTANY EIGHTY YEARS AGO. By ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK.
Arnold. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
Nowhere in England, nor even in Ireland or Scotland, could the life
pictured in this book be paralleled. Feudalism has lingered, but
not in delicate or decorative ways: in the Brittany of which Miss
Sedgwick tells us, the beauty, the generous abundance, and the sincere
brotherliness of life almost overcome one's distaste for the feudal
system which formed its basis. The lady whose childhood is shown us
was of a noble Breton family; her father seems to have been the only
Republican she knew among the company of Royalists; life was still so
ordered that the country people, coming to Mass, would bow to the lord
and lady of the manor, after paying their respects to the altar. Yet
one is left with a sense of fraternity as genuine as that one feels in
reading Chaucer, as the story witnesses:
One peasant, I remember, Paul Simur by name, of whom my father was
specially fond, was so dirty and unwashed that a sort of mark of
dirt had formed upon his features. One day, at a hunting-party, papa
called to Paul to come and sit beside him, and the other huntsmen,
with singular bad taste, began to make fun of Paul, who sat much
abashed, with hanging head. Papa affectionately laid an arm about
his neck and defended him, until his friends finally cried out that
they wagered he would not kiss him. At this, although he confessed
afterwards to the most intense repugnance, he at once kissed Paul
heartily. Poor Paul was quite overcome. He came to my father
afterwards with tears in his eyes and said, standing before him and
gazing at him: "_Oh, mon maître, que je t'aime!_"