Fiction
A Notable First Novel The Silent Queen. By W. Seymour Leslie. (Cape. 7s. 6d.)
Mn. SEYMOUR LESLIE has attempted the most difficult of literary puzzles, namely, to find a formula which combines, between the covers of a cohering, consecutive book, the " spaciousness " (to use his word) of the 'nineties, the transition of the War-period, and what we may call the " jazz " of the present day. By " jazz " I do not mean (nor does he) the trivial round of night-clubs, cocktails, and pink legs which forms so wearisome a topic in the sprightly stories of the present day and renders them so remarkably unreadable, for he is sufficiently fine an observer to be aware that, however many of these frail eggs are broken, nothing resembling an
eatable omelette will result. But what he does give us is tbg true jazz of the present day, the squeals and broken rhythms and general monkey-tricks of the mind and spirit, below which after all, as he admirably shows, there still remains, "when the feast is finished and the lamps expire," that abiding dream-stuff which is the sweetness and the tragedy and the joy of -life. No writer can set himself a problem more difficult of solution, for he has to make us feel that the firstr personal narrator has lived through these epochs and, while affected by each of them in turn, emerges from the last chapter the same individual who takes his header into the first. With- out any doubt Mr. Leslie has scored a triumphant success in this synthesis.
The book opens with high felicity. Instead of being ironical about the demoded 'nineties he presents us with a picture painted with sincere tenderness and sympathy : instead of making us feel how wooden and weary was the life of those antediluvian elders, he makes us realize that they were ex- tremely human and that their long leisures, their boilings of eggs timed by the hour-glass, their picnics, their sedate days were just as interesting, and rightly so, as are the scurrying§ of to-day. He does not laugh at them, and thus make wearisome farce of them, but, observing them with the wise wide eyes of childhood, gives us excellent comedy. This comedy he presents in a child's authentic manner : it is n series of dissolving views, each vivid in itself, which melt into each other with that abstract timelessness of survey with which a child always regards its environment. Dough-nuts and telescopes, glimpses of Queen Victoria, ol Nara, of an adorable grandmamma who shuts out Horrid Truths with her handkerchief, of the new-fangled motor-car (" too windy for women "), all occupy for the moment the entire stage and are of equal and absorbing importance. Mr. Leslie does not fall into Stevenson's error in supposing that a child ever draws any moral reflections from what it sees, and the first section of his book is a gem of observant and affection. ate paganism. The world is full of fairies (Grandmamma in especial is a fairy), but the child is not of them : it looks at their antics and remembers them with the friendliest accuracy.
But this detachment cannot last : as the gleam of fairy-land fades into the light of common day, the child wakes into (so-called) realities, and here in his Second section of transition Mr. Leslie does not quite keep up the excellence of his comedy. To be able to preserve the spirit of true comedy without slipping into satire, caricature, and consequently farce on the one hand, or, on the other, into stodginess, is. the rarest 61 gifts, and Mr. Leslie does not accomplish it. He allows him. self to ridicule, he gives his puppets ludicrous names like Pool and Hercules, and instead of smilingly watching them, he pinches and prods them to make them gabble. In itself, his satire is just and telling, but satire at all, when pure comedy is So well within his reach, is, as Grandmamma would have said, "a sad pity." Again, to the lay-mind, the element of business which strongly enters into the book is not sufficiently clarified : we know there are Herculean dealings in progress which end in the death of Pout, and of which the fluctuations entail journeys to Milan, Berlin, and Vienna, but these are dumped in a sort of middle distance, neither in the unfocussed back- ground nor in the detailed foreground, where such affairs have no place and only obstruct free passage. President Hercules has early interested us with his sense of the romance in busi- ness and his intriguing aphorism that "beauty is an inevit- able function of efficiency," but our expectations are not gratified : he does not fulfil his first promise.
But it would be a futile critic who took much notice of these two defects, for there is plenty to occupy us more legitimately in The Silent Queen. In the last and longest section of the book, which deals with the present, Mr. Leslie happily recovers his sense of comedy, and the two women, Juanita and Wiffreda, are adorable. The one, it is true, brings in a note of tragedy, but as Socrates proved long ago (though we do not know his reasoning) the muses of tragedy and comedy are the same gifted lady. Tragedy and comedy are both artistically genuine, whereas the muse of farce, though diverting, is false, and the death of Juanita does not outrage our feelings because it is poignantly sad. We accept, also, the astonishing statement that "she never lost her chastity" whatever she did, just as easily as we accept the no more obvious fact that time and money were words which had no existence in her Nocabidari. How could-they ? She -was a .fairy: And Wilfreda is of the same breed, till, at. the very end, to our delighted surprise; she becomes a -woman. That again is do :outrage Mr.-Leslie is right about her, as indeed he is about almost everything in this charming and unusual book.
E. F. BENSON.
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