Fiction
Going to Seed
(Allen and Unwin. 10s. 6d.) Watkins. (Elkin Mathews and The Lacquer Lady. By F. 7s. t3d.)
Background. By Noel Forrest.
THE atmosphere of the two more important of these novels is heavy and feverish. Penetrating into Goncharov's Russia of the "fifties," and Miss Watkins' America of the " eighties " one immediately breathes the odours of incipient decay which cling to promising minds that are going to seed. The Russian is pathetically disintegrating ; the American sends out wilder and more contorted suckers that drink the vitality out of everything they touch in order to disguise the growing hollowness within. Both novels are too long, though, since Oblomov was written in 1858, it must be forgiven; and both
follow their central character to senility and death.
Of the two, Oblomov is more alive in the sense that one believes in the bodily existence of the characters. Further- more, as a minor Russian classic, of which this is the first complete English translation, Oblomov has the virtue of creating a national type. Though he receives his author's moral disapprobation, Oblomov is the Slavonic protest against energy and action. He is never gross. At his worst he dozes and snores ; at his best he dreams and his heart sings. A promising, indolent, spineless young man, existing wretchedly
on the fruits of a decaying and neglected estate, he is the worried, yawning and unwashed monument to non-resistance and inanition. He lies all day in his old dressing gown on a couch in his dirty flat in St. Petersburg, dreaming of the letters he ought to write, the decisions he must postpone, the reforms which he plans to introduce into the management of his estate. He is bullied by his valet, snared and robbed by his friends, swindled by his bailiff. He has a foil in the energetic, Germanic Stolz. It is Stolz who marries in the end the lady whom Oblomov, pathetically and vainly strug- gling with his lack of will, has attempted to love. Oblomov wakes up one morning to find he has married his landlady. One is left in doubt as to whether Oblomov's life is a tragedy, for the sordidness of his environment does not appear to sully something rare, sensitive and poetic in his nature.. His
spirit is apparently untouched by his degradation as a member of society, and he remains to the end a child. But if there is something positiVe in the Russian's anti-social genius, that something is not heroic. Oblomov is not a great novel, in part, because Goncharov neither scorns nor, on the other hand, exalts his man sufficiently. For all the pages of caustic farce, Oblomov is surrounded by a mist of-sentiment rather than of pity. The best pages are those which follow the comedy and pathos of Oblomov's vacillating love affair. There are some weak spots in the translator's dialogue.
This Poor Player has something in common with Gon- charov's story. Birney, the brilliant young student of philosophy in Miss Watkins' book has the temperament of the actor. He draws inspiration from the presence of an audience. Alone, before a sheet of blank paper, he is incapable, and the magnum opus which he is always planning, replanning and perfecting never comes to anything but talk. Hollowed by fear and egotism, he surrounds himself by weaker people whose belief in him will hide his own failure from himself and, in return, he is their brain and their tongue. They live in the disordered glow of his generalizations until, seeing that he is exhausting the capacity for belief in one environment, he flees to another, leaving tragedy in the lives of those whose vitality he has drained. Miss Watkins is merciless - and skilful in her revelations of Birney's growing doubts and of the tragic suspicions which empty the lives of the three women whom, without passion, he dominates. There is a certain limited majesty about the book both in the suavity of its prose and the unity of its conception. It has three major defects, and they are rooted in an unhumorous earnest- ness. Birney, after all, is a charlatan in his particular medium, and Miss Watkins, lacking the stereoscopic spectacles of, say, Goncharov's humour, does not fundamentally admit this. The second fault is that, taking Birney too earnestly, and even having the air of learning from him, she has provided him with no opposition worth the name. If magnetic personalities bewitch the weak they have the strong to reckon with Birney does not develop very much ; the landmarks between the episodes and advancing years are so slight that there is a certain sense of flatness. There is something forced also about the background of secluded, dignified and cultivated country life. These professors, connoisseurs and writers are the idealizations which solemn Boston might see in its mirrors. Nevertheless there is a fine austerity in This Poor Player. It is the work of a strong and impassioned intellect and must take a place in the front rank of American fiction.
The Lacquer Lady falls between three stories. There is the story of the intrigues and massacres that led to the decliae of the fantastic Burmese kingdom in Mandalay on the eve of the British conquest in 1885, which the author has described with considerable attention to historical detail. With this is slightly entwined the life story of Fanny, the daughter of an Italian weaver and a Burmese mother, whose beauty matures early and declines tragically soon. And there is the contrasting story of Agatha, a typical missionary daughter, finding sour consolation for the disappointments of her marriage to a clergyman, in a narrow religion. Fanny, revenging herself on a French lover, plays some part in the overthrow of the native court in which she has been accepted and through whose eyes it is seen. The book is remarkable for its character studies of the two girls who are traced remorselessly to old age. With the personages of the native court the author is far less successful, and one has the impression that she has tried to assimilate too much material.
Background entertains one with the miseries of defeated snobbery which attack, and temporarily estrange, a young couple who have come into a lot of money and are " frozen out " of the county life they are attempting to enter. It is the kind of story in which the indescribably beautiful and poorly clad ward arrives, Peg o' my Heart fashion, at the wrong moment—a light but distinctly banal piece of work.
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