FiCtion
Romance and Realism
Mr. Hodge: and -Mr. Hazard. By Elinor Wylie. (Heinemann.
The English, Miss: )3y R. H.- Mottran' (Chatto and Windt's.
WHEN Elinor Wylie writes, I surrender mySelf to her ethei-eal irony, her imaginative audacity, her wirelike Sub-flavotirs of flints and flowers, and refuse to allow the pleasure of the Con:, noissear to bet:lashed by the duty of a critic. She is a pleasUre,
a sophisticated pleasure. Tribe her- or leave her. Either . .
" I love all that thou lovest, - Spirit of delight,"
or hastily seek something substantial, simple, and unvexed by her elusive suggestions of all the spoil of beauty wrecked along the shores of history. Mr. Hazard is a composite Romantic poet, an " image made from various clays," an implacable idealist who loses all in trying to force his heavenly patterns on a reluctant world. He goes to seek a little rest from malady and suffering by the Thames, during a green April. By the river he finds two lovely children, Allegra and Penserosa, with elfin aquiline faces. The mother of these faery children is Lady Clara, "cast. in porcelain," like another Clara ; and one is charmed to find that they descend from the bizarre Gerald Poynytird in Jennifer. Lorn. The dreamy chapters tell of his delicate intercoursiwith them, and of the diaphanous love which was all this ascetic needed for his life and art. Lyonnesse, where the girls dwell among rainbows and waters, coloured like peridot and pearl, comes to seem " a soft bed, and a sweetly scented coffin" Where his pain will go to sleep. But Mr. Hodge, the staid tutor,' arrives, the embodiment of common sense. He ruthlessly tears the dewy web of love. Mr. Hazard, nevertheless, goes proudly, sending to Clara his moonstone intaglio, whereon the lion rends the stricken hart, while Mr. Hodge, uncomfortable, packs his books for him. It is a book smelling of " yew and jasmine," and coloured like mother of pearl.
A more emphatic contrast than Mr. Mottram's English Miss it would be hard to find. Mr. Mottram likes stolidity. But in his stolid Madeleine there were possibilities of tragic folly and generosity. Marny Childers is a very ordinary, though much cherished, suburban girl. She lives in a com- fortable Philistian house with an admirable bathroom. (Her baths are unnecessarily recorded.) She goes to a " sound " stupid school, where imagination is discouraged, and games are devotedly played, evidently merely to fit the pupils for more games. Marny, naturally, is clean, wholesome, dense, and obedient. The European War comes, and she passes from school to:Lady Barstowe's stationary Ambulance Unit, where she most:efficiently learns that " they also ,serye:who only, stand and wait."-: :Her young neighbour, Rex Proudfont, gets his cominissiori3; and, in a wordless wooing, they embrace. He is drafted off,- never reaches the Front, and dies,of influenza after the Armistice. Marny goes out in relief work to the scene of his grayet_Things kegio_to happen rather too late in the, novel. She finds her love-token to Rex in the rags of an unfortunate baby, whose unregarded death is the one painful episode in the book. Her efficiency does not seem to stand the stern realities of France ; but the presiding doctor falls in love with her, and she realizes she can easily forget Rex. We have a disappointed impression that the portrait is capable and 'sound, but that the subject is not worth treatment. Does Mr. Mottram's war-reaction work out in a weakness for _density if it only be supplied with bathrooms ? Marny may make a good wife, but not a good novel. , In The Assassin Mr. -Liam O'Flaherty twists us violently in another direction. The sinister figure "with destitute eyes " in the gloomy street is Michael MeDant, fixed in his deadly purpose--an assassin literally, dazed by his terrible Idea, which sometimes holds him in a black ecstasy, some- times" drags him through circles of panic and madness. His associates are Francis Tumulty, a muddled enthusiast, and Gutty Fetch, a creature of mere evil. The strange Revolu- tionary, Kitty Mellett, is his helper. In sordid gambling dens and lodging houses, vile suburbs of hell, the stealthy figures slink about, till the plot of death is complete ; and the assassi- nation happens with an actuality that shakeS the reader's nerves. MeDam's after-state is agonizingly analysed ; the moment when he recognizes he is going to London to kill himself has a DostOevsky touch. A terrible, disconcerting, powerful book, itself almost assassinating in its effect.
,4 Man of Learning is an elaborate satire, in the form of a realistic biography, complete with portrait and appendices; Concerning a " go-getter" President of a Middle-West Univer- Sity. The lifelong humbug; hypocrisy, and greed of this red- blooded, hundred per cent. American, Elk, and Rotarian is recorded in a solemnly amusing manner, with grave foot- notes when necessary. Arthur Patrick Redfield; -Ph.D.s LLD., has some affinity with Elmer Gantry. The controlled fury of Mr. Sinclair Lewis, hoviever, would be necessary to make this mock-history significant to' the end.
RACHEL AN14AND TAYLOR.
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