'I don't agree with you at all.' As she spoke I felt that Miss Amber
Reeves would have greeted as defiantly the converse of my proposition.
She stood in a large garden on Campden Hill, where an at-home was
proceeding, her effect heightened by Mr Ford Madox Hueffer's weary
polish, and the burning twilight of Miss May Sinclair. Not far off Mr
Wyndham Lewis was languid and Mr Gilbert Cannan eloquently silent. Miss
Violet Hunt, rather mischievous, talked to Mr Edgar Jepson, who
obviously lay in ambush, preparing to slay an idealist, presumably Sir
Rabindrahath Tagore. I felt very mild near this young lady, so dark in
the white frock of simplicity or artifice, with broad cheeks that
recalled the rattlesnake, soft cheeks tinted rather like a tea rose,
with long, dark eyes, wicked, aggressive, and yet laughing. I felt very
old--well over thirty. For Miss Reeves had just come down from Newnham,
and, indeed, that afternoon she was still coming down ... on a toboggan.
When I met her the other day she said: 'Well, perhaps you are right.'
It's queer how one changes!
She was about twenty-three, and that is not so long ago; she was still
the child who has been 'brought up pious,' attended Sunday School and
felt a peculiar property in God. Daughter of a New Zealand Cabinet
Minister and of a mother so rich in energy that she turned to suffrage
the scholarly Mr Pember Reeves, Miss Amber Reeves was a spoilt child.
She was also the child of a principle, had been sent to Kensington High
School to learn to be democratic and meet the butcher's daughter. She
had been to Newnham too, taken up socialism, climbed a drain pipe and
been occasionally sought in marriage. At ten she had written poems and
plays, then fortunately gave up literature and, as a sponge flung into
the river of life, took in people as they were, arrived at the maxim
that things do not matter but only the people who do them. A last
attempt to organise her took place in the London School of Economics,
where she was to write a thesis; one sometimes suspects that she never
got over it.
This is not quite just, for she is changed. Not hostile now, but
understanding, interested in peculiarities as a magpie collecting
spoons. Without much illusion, though; her novels are the work of a
faintly cynical Mark Tapley.
She is driven to mimic the ordinary people whom she cannot help loving,
who are not as herself, yet whom she forgives because they amuse her.
She is still the rattlesnake of gold and rose, but (zoological
originality) one thinks also of an Italian greyhound with folded paws,
or a furred creature of the bush that lurks and watches with eyes
mischievous rather than cruel.
On reading this over again I discover that she has got over the London
School of Economics, though her first two books showed heavy the brand
of Clare Market. Miss Amber Reeves started out to do good, but has
fortunately repented. She has not written many novels, only three in
five years, an enviable record, and they were good novels, with faults
that are not those of Mrs Barclay or of Mr Hall Caine. Over every
chapter the Blue Book hovered. Her first novel, _The Reward of Virtue_,
exhibited the profound hopelessness of youth. For Evelyn Baker, daughter
of a mother who was glad she was a girl because 'girls are so much
easier,' was doomed to lead the stupid life. Plump, handsome, fond of
pink, she lived in Notting Hill, went to dances, loved the artist and
married the merchant, knew she did not love the merchant and went on
living with him; she took to good works, grew tired of them, and gave
birth to a girl child, thanking fate because 'girls are so much easier.'
The story of Evelyn is so much the story of everybody that it seems
difficult to believe it is the story of anybody. But it is. _The Reward
of Virtue_ is a remarkable piece of realism, and it is evidence of taste
in a first novel to choose a stupid heroine, and not one who plays
Vincent d'Indy and marries somebody called Hugo.
In that book Miss Amber Reeves indicated accomplishment, but this was
rather slight; only in her second novel, _A Lady and Her Husband_, was
she to develop her highest quality: the understanding of the ordinary
man. (All young women novelists understand the artist, or nobody does;
the man they seldom understand is the one who spends fifty years
successfully paying bills.) The ordinary man is Mr Heyham, who runs tea
shops and easily controls a handsome wife of forty-five, while he fails
to control Fabian daughters and a painfully educated son. He runs his
tea shops for profit, while Mrs Heyham comes to the unexpected view that
he should run them for the good of his girls. There is a revolution in
Hampstead when she discovers that Mr Heyham does not, for the girls are
sweated; worse still, she sees that to pay them better will not help
much, for extra wages will not mean more food but only more hats. They
are all vivid, the hard, lucid daughters, the soft and illogical Mrs
Heyham, and especially Mr Heyham, kindly, loving, generous, yet capable
of every beastliness while maintaining his faith in his own rectitude.
Mr Heyham is a triumph, for he is just everybody; he is 'the man with
whose experiences women are trained to sympathise while he is not
trained to sympathise with theirs.' He is the ordinary, desirous man,
the male. Listen to this analysis of man: 'He has a need to impress
himself on the world he finds outside him, an impulse that drives him to
achieve his ends recklessly, ruthlessly, through any depth of suffering
and conflict ... it is just by means of the qualities that are often so
irritating, their tiresome restlessness, their curiosity, their
disregard for security, for seemliness, even for life itself, that men
have mastered the world and filled it with the wealth of civilisation.
It is after this foolish, disorganised fashion of theirs, each of
them--difficult, touchy creatures--busy with his personal ambitions,
that they have armed the race with science, dignified it with art--one
can take men lightly but one cannot take lightly the things that men
have done.'
That sort of man sweats his waitresses because such is his duty to the
shareholders. It is in this sort of man, Mr Heyham, who wants more
money, in Edward Day, the prig who hates spending it, that Miss Amber
Reeves realises herself. Analysis rather than evocation is her mission;
she does not as a rule seek beauty, and when she strives, as in her last
novel, _Helen in Love_, where a cheap little minx is kissed on the
beach and is thus inspired, Miss Amber Reeves fails to achieve beauty in
people; she achieves principally affectation. Beauty is not her
_metier_; irony and pity are nearer to her, which is not so bad if we
reflect that such is the motto of Anatole France. Oh! she is no mocking
literary sprite, as the Frenchman, nor has she his graces; she is
somewhat tainted by the seriousness of life, but she has this to
distinguish her from her fellows: she can achieve laughter without
hatred.
One should not, however, dismiss in a few words this latest novel. One
can disregard the excellent picture of the lower-middle class family
from which Helen springs, its circumscribed nastiness, its vulgar
pleasure in appearances, for Miss Amber Reeves has done as good work
before. But one must observe her new impulse towards the rich, idle,
cultured people, whom she idealises so that they appear as worn
ornaments of silver-gilt. It seems that she is reacting against
indignation, that she is turning away from social reform towards the
caste that has achieved a corner in graces. It may be that she has come
to think the world incurable and wishes to retire as an anchorite ...
only she retires to Capua: this is not good, for any withdrawal into a
selected atmosphere implies that criticism of this atmosphere is
suspended. Nothing so swiftly as that kills virility in literature.
But even so Miss Amber Reeves distinguishes herself from her immediate
rivals, Miss Viola Meynell, Miss Bridget Maclagan, Miss Sheila
Kaye-Smith, Miss Katherine Gerould, by an interest in business and in
politics. She really knows what is a limited liability company or an
issue warrant. She is not restricted to love, but embraces such problems
as money, rank, science, class habits, which serve or destroy love. She
finds her way in the modern tangle where emotion and cupidity trundle
together on a dusty road. She is not always just, but she is usually
judicial. Her men are rather gross instead of strong; she likes them,
she tolerates them, they are altogether brutes and 'poor dears.' But
then we are most of us a little like that.