FICTION

By FORREST REID

PERHAPS I am super-sensitive, but there are certain authors for whom one has a respect and a regard, an almost personal affection, and I wish Mr. Ford Madox Ford would stop writing

about " poor dear Conrad." Even if it is not faintly derogatory, there is something patronising in the phrase, and this is the stranger because there cannot be many novelists whose work Mr. Ford really admires. He is critical ; he is fastidious ; he has a highly-developed sense of style. Both he and Conrad arc in the same camp ; they are artists—that is to say ranged against " the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form." More than from any other modern writer one gets from Conrad, I think, the sense of nobility, and I do not see why this should arouse in Mr.

Ford a spirit of mischief, but so it is, and though I know nothing of the sort is intended, a certain impression of disloyalty is created, one is quite sure, for instance, that Conrad would

never have written in this way about him.

Yet Mr. Ford is whole-hearted enough in his admiration

for Monsieur Rene Behaine, whose work he eulogises in a preface to The Survivors, now translated into English by Mr. Edward Crankshaw. The Survivors is indeed an excellent novel, but it would be an exaggeration to call it a masterpiece, and I personally would infinitely rather have written Lord Jim or The Secret Agent.

Monsieur Behaine's novel is a study of an ancient French family which gradually drops into decay because it is out of touch with the modern world and its ideals, and is itself weakened by a sort of apathy or indifference that makes it an easy victim to those who seek to exploit it. These royalists and aristocrats refuse to enter into competition with commercial .

unscrupulousness ; they prefer, rather, to close their eyes to what is going on.

" Monsieur de Laignes made no demands, and year by year the debts accumulated. But just this negligence on the part of their landlord fostered in the minds of those whom he imagined he was helping the idea that they could deceive him with impunity ; and soon all the little dishonesties committed at his expense came to be regarded almost as legitimate . . . Meanwhile, as respect for the de Laigneses dwindled, so did all memory of the family fade, and others assumed the position they had vacated."

Monsieur Behaine is so detached a writer that one hardly knows whether he is in sympathy with his characters or not. The time is probably the end of the last century, their world a caste-ridden and class-bound world, not very intelligent, a prey to every convention, religious in an empty and formal sense, not really cultured, but well-mannered and vaguely picturesque. Nothing could be less exuberant than Monsieur Behaine's method, yet he has brought this world to life. The novel is presented after a fashion peculiarly French : that is to say, the narrative is almost entirely unbroken by dialogue., and the whole thing is viewed in a kind of historical retrospect.

Through a somewhat languid and autumnal atmosphere scenes and persons emerge vividly, and often the touch has a poetic quality that calls up, one hardly knows how or why, a picture haunted and beautiful.

" He left, and the château was shut up . . . From time to time news of the family still came to the village. Antoine, often at first, then less and less frequently, wrote to say that he was coming : but he never came. The tall iron gates, which were never opened now, took on the colour of rust, like the railings round neglected graves."

It will be clear from such a passage that the book has lost little, if anything, in Mr. Crankshaw's admirable version. It

is a fine and distinguished piece of writing. It contains nothing, either in plot, style, or manner, that is likely to make it widely popular—nothing sensational, nothing sentimental, nothing even humorous—but it is the work of a delicate, sensitive, and scrupulous artist.

There is a vast difference between a novel like The Survivors and one like Miss Bruce's Men Are so Helpless, yet I dare say that where the former will attract one reader the latter will attract ten. In the first place Miss Bruce is much easier, much less exacting. Her whole tale is on the surface, can be read swiftly while the wireless is going, without danger of anything being lost. And this, of course, makes for popit- larity. Also there is no doubt about the characters, no subtlety of presentation, they are as clearly and obviously differentiated as if labels were attached to them. Avice Brophy is the possessive female, the type to whom love is everything, and yet only remains love while its selfishness is gratified. Avice does an enormous amount of harm and remains quite uncon- scious of it. If she loves a person that is sufficient, nothing else matters, any alien interest must be obliterated unscrupul- ously. So, though she is devoted to them, she succeeds in ruining the lives of her father, of her first husband, of her second husband, of her son. It is because she must be all or nothing, cannot tolerate a rival, and a rival need not necessarily be a person, may be one's work, may be a career. The novel is a lively and readable one, though neither in its grammar nor its style is it impeccable. Clichés abound—" love's young dream," " the best laid plans of mice and men," &c., but such sentences are written every day, and Miss Bruce at any rate is not dull.

Surely the feeblest novelist ought to be able to invent an original name for his book. Plagiarism of this sort, one would think, must be a matter either of carelessness or of sheer indif- ference. Yet among recent borrowed titles we have had Emma, appropriated from Jane Austen, The Return, from Walter de la Mare, The Square Peg, from W. E. Norris, The Other House, from Henry James, and now Mr. Hansard un- blushingly gives us The Silver Fox, though The Silver Fox by E. (B Somerville and Martin Ross might, I suppose, be described as a kind of minor classic, and if its existence is unknown to Mr. Hansard, I can hardly imagine that it is un- known to his publishers. To be sure, it is not a matter of vital importance ; I should regard it rather as a nuisance, a breach of good manners, a sign that simple courtesy is at present considered to be an old-fashioned and negligible virtue.

This new The Silver Fox is a fantastic tale, good in places, and elsewhere crude and melodramatic. The blurb informs us that it has been influenced by Professor Dunne's An Experiment with Time, but I think we may ignore the hint, for on its meta- physical side The Silver Fox is thin, the idea upon which it is based being the very ancient one of reincarnation. Angus Maxwell, absorbed in his study of Mary Queen of Scots, believes that in a previous life he was William Maitland of Lethington. His researches take him to Munich where he meets and engages as his secretary, Ursula von Fiiren, who in a previous existence was the luckless Mary herself. The story thus blends the present with the past. The old adventure is woven into a tale of modern Germany—a somewhat sensational tale, involving spies and political intrigue, as well as a Mysterious character called Falk, who dogs the steps of Ursula, and is apparently a reincarnation of the Queen's executioner. I may say at once that the novel is not even temporarily con- vincing. I myself found it readable, because I have a taste for the marvellous, and can still enjoy such works as The Lancashire Witches. But I know this taste is puerile, and that The Silver Fox is merely an exploitation of vulgar superstition. Mr. Hansard is not a mystic, not a philosopher, he has no faith in his own romance, and it has no spiritual significance whatever. I am sure he has glanced through Professor Dunne's work, but I suspect that in doing so his primary motive was to find material for the concoction of a thriller.

It seems to me surprising that anybody should have thought The Child of Divorce worth translating, or, if translated, worth publishing. Yet here it is, though the translation is anonymous and obviously mediocre. The novel itself is concerned with a sickly and very unboyish boy. He has a mother who is devoted to him, and a father whom she has divorced and who is a chaser of women. He has also two brothers who do not come very much into the tale. " Put that in your pipe and smoke it," says one small boy to another, and the remark is typical of the book. The plot, it is true, presents quite a number of possibilities, but the treatment suggests a singular blindness to them, and is

devoid of any sense of reality. .