I do not know whether this is a compliment, but I should not be
surprised if a reader of, say, _Starbrace_ or _Sussex Gorse_, were to
think that Sheila Kaye-Smith is the pen-name of a man. Just as one
suspects those racy tales of guardsmen, signed 'Joseph Brown' or 'George
Kerr,' of originating from some scented boudoir, so does one hesitate
before the virility, the cognisance of oath and beer, of rotating crop,
sweating horse, account book, vote and snickersnee that Sheila
Kaye-Smith exhibits in all her novels. This is broader, deeper than the
work of the women novelists of to-day, who, with the exception of Amber
Reeves, are confined in a circle of eternally compounding pallid or
purple loves. One side of her work, notably, surprises, and that is the
direction of her thoughts away from women, their great and little
griefs, towards men and the glory of their combat against fate. Sheila
Kaye-Smith is more than any of her rivals the true novelist: the showman
of life.
Yet she is a woman. You will imagine her as seeming small, but not so;
very thin, with a grace all made of quiescence, her eyes gray and
retracted a little, as if always in pain because man is not so beautiful
as the earth that bore him, because he fails in idealism, falls away
from his hopes and cannot march but only shamble from one eternity into
another. There is in her a sort of cosmic choler restrained by a Keltic
pride that is ready to pretend a world made up of rates and taxes and
the 9.2 train to London Bridge. Afire within, she will not allow herself
to 'commit melodrama.' In _Isle of Thorns_ her heroine, Sally Odiarne,
so describes her attempt to murder her lover, and I like to think of
Sheila Kaye-Smith's will leashing the passion that strains. I like even
more to think of the same will giving rein to anger, of a converse cry:
'Commit melodrama! I jolly well shall! I'm justabout sick of things!'
'Justabout!' That word, free-scattered in the speech of her rustics, is
all Sussex. For Sheila Kaye-Smith has given expression to the county
that from the Weald spreads green-breasted to meet the green sea. In all
the novels is the slow Sussex speech, dotted with the kindly 'surelye,'
the superlative 'unaccountable'; women are 'praaper,' ladies 'valiant,'
troubles 'tedious.' It has colour, it is true English, unstained of
Cockneyism and American. It is the speech of the oasthouse, of the
cottage on the marsh, of the forester's hut in Udimore Wood, where sings
the lark and rivulets flow like needles through the moss.
_Assez de litterature!_ Sheila Kaye-Smith is not a painter, even though
with dew diamonds the thorn-bush she spangle. Her Sussex is male: it is
not the dessicated Sussex of the modern novelist, but the Sussex of the
smuggler, of the Methodist, the squire; the Sussex where men sweat, and
read no books. Old Sussex, and the Sussex of to-day which some think was
created by the L.B. & S.C. Railway, she loves them both, and in both has
found consolation, but I think she loves best the old. It was old Sussex
made her first novel, _The Tramping Methodist_. Old Sussex bred its
hero, Humphrey Lyte. He was a picaresque hero, the young rebel, for he
grew enmeshed in murder and in love, in the toils of what England called
justice in days when the Regent went to Brighton. But Lyte does not
reveal Sheila Kaye-Smith as does _Starbrace_. Here is the apologia for
the rebel: Starbrace, the son of a poor and disgraced man, will not eat
the bread of slavery at his grandfather's price. You will imagine the
old man confronted with this boy, of gentle blood but brought up as a
labourer's son, hot, unruly, lusting for the freedom of the wet earth.
Starbrace is a fool; disobedient he is to be flogged. He escapes among
the smugglers on Winchelsea marsh, to the wild world of the
mid-eighteenth century. It is a world of fighting, and of riding, of
blood, of excisemen, of the 'rum pads' and their mistresses, their
dicing and their death. Despite his beloved, Theodora Straightway, lady
who fain would have him gentleman, Starbrace must ride away upon his
panting horse, Pharisee. Love as he may, he cannot live like a rabbit in
a hutch; he must have danger, be taken, cast into a cell, be released to
die by the side of Pharisee, charging the Pretender's bodyguard at
Prestonpans. All this is fine, for she has the secret of the historical
novel: to show not the things that have changed, but those which have
not.
_Starbrace_ is, perhaps, Sheila Kaye-Smith's most brilliant flight, but
not her most sustained. She has had other adventures in literature, such
as _Isle of Thorns_, where Sally Odiarne wanders with Stanger's
travelling show, hopelessly entangled in her loves, unable to seize
happiness, unable to give herself to the tender Raphael, bound to
good-tempered, sensual Andy, until at last she must kill Andy to get
free, kill him to escape to the sea and die. But she finds God:--
'She had come out to seek death, and had found life. Who can stand
against life, the green sea that tumbles round one's limbs and
tears up like matchwood the breakwaters one has built? There,
kneeling in the surf and spray, Sally surrendered to life.'
Sheila Kaye-Smith has not surrendered to life, though the weakness of
her may be found in another book, _Three Against the World_, where the
worthless Furlonger family can but writhe as worms drying in the sun; in
the tired flatness of her last work, _The Challenge to Sirius_. The
vagary of her mind is in such work as criticism: she has published a
study of John Galsworthy which is judicial, though not inspired. But
she was destined for finer tasks. Already in _Spell Land_, the story of
a Sussex farm where lived two people, driven out of the village because
they loved unwed, she had given a hint of her power to see not only man
but the earth. She has almost stated herself in _Sussex Gorse_.
I have read many reviews of this book. I am tired of being told it is
'epic.' It is not quite; it has all the grace that Zola lacked in _La
Terre_, but if the beauty is anything it is Virgilian, not Homeric. The
scheme is immense, the life of Reuben Backfield, of Odiam, inspired in
early youth with the determination to possess Boarzell, the common grown
with gorse and firs, the fierce land of marl and shards where naught
save gorse could live. The opening is a riot, for the Enclosures Act is
in force and the squire is seizing the people's land. In that moment is
born Reuben's desire; Boarzell shall be his. He buys some acres and his
struggle is frightful; you see his muscles bulging in his blue shirt,
you smell his sweat, you hear the ploughshare gripped with the stones,
teeth biting teeth. For Boarzell Common is old, crafty, and savage, and
would foil man. Reuben is not foiled; he can bear all things, so can
dare all things. He buys more land; there shall be on his farm no
pleasure so that he may have money to crush Boarzell. His brother,
Harry, is struck while Reuben blows up the enemy trees, and haunts his
life, a horrible, idiot figure; his wife, Naomi, ground down by forced
child-bearing (for Boarzell needs men and Reuben sons) dies. His six
sons, devoid of the money Boarzell takes, leave him; one becomes a
thief, another a sailor, another a sot in London, another a success; all
leave him, even his daughters; one to marry a hated rival farmer, one to
love because Reuben forbade love, and to end on the streets. He loses
all, he loses his pretty second wife, he loses Alice Jury whom alone he
loved, he loses the sons that Rose gave him. He gives all to Boarzell,
to fighting it for seventy years, sometimes victor, sometimes crushed,
for Boarzell is evil and fierce:
'It lay in a great hush, a great solitude, a quiet beast of power
and mystery. It seemed to call to him through the twilight like a
love forsaken. There it lay: Boarzell--strong, beautiful, desired,
untamed, still his hope, still his battle.'
There are faults, here and there, degraded cliches; Sheila Kaye-Smith
loves the stars too well, and often indulges in horrid astronomic
orgies; there is not enough actual combat with the earth; the author
intervenes, points to the combat instead of leaving at grips the two
beasts, Reuben and Boarzell. She has not quite touched the epic, yet
makes us want to resemble the hero, fierce, cruel, but great when old
and alone, still indomitable. And one wonders what she will do, what she
will be. There are lines in her poems, _Willow's Forge_, that prophesy;
the moment may be enough:--
'When the last constellations faint and fall,
When the last planets burst in fiery foam,
When all the winds have sunk asleep, when all
The worn way-weary comets have come home--
When past and present and the future flee,
My moment lives!'
She may strive no more, as she proposes to the seeker in _The Counsel of
Gilgamesh_:--
'Why wander round Gilgamesh?
Why vainly wander round?
What canst thou find, O seeker,
Which hath not long been found?
What canst thou know, O scholar,
Which hath not long been known?
What canst thou have, O spoiler,
Which dead men did not own?'
But I do not think so. I do not know whether she will be great. It is
enough that to-day she is already alone.