FICTION
AN. ESCAPE INTO REALITY
Miss Tiverton Goes Out. By the Author of The House Made With Hands. (Arrowsmith. 7s. 6d. net.) Miss Tirerton Goes Out is a novel of great beauty and insight. It is a pity that the author chooses to remain anonymous,
for it rather chills our compliments when we have no means of knowing to whom we are addressing them. Still, let us con-
fess that it is a novel to be grateful for. It contains a quality rare enough in novels, an essential goodness. Disordered goodness is a painful thing ; a gush of kindliness in a novel is apt to make the reader suddenly self-conscious and bring him round to believing that art has no connexion at all with morality. Those gushes of kindliness are continually turning
reviewers into cynics. Even Mr. Galsworthy drives us to exclaim : "But you don't know how horrid people are
You haven't a conception of absolute blank tragedy, unrelieved by small nobilities of soul ! " But the author of Miss Tiverton Goes Out is never hampered in her judgments by her charity. She sees everything, it seems, and still remains infinitely well-disposed. The result is that she writes excellently in detail, and excellently in the whole ; and her novel leaves us with a sense of satisfaction and delight.
Juliet Simpson's mother was the great granddaughter of an earl, her father was a speculative builder, and the family —there are four children—are surrounded with an atmosphere of incompetent snobbism from their cradles. Their mother believes that they are all, somehow, of a superior breed ; and she and her husband combine, with exactly too much ostentation (if it may be so phrased), to keep up the pretence that they are aristocrats. When Juliet goes to her first school —they are all brought up rather at random—the car is sent to bring her home ; they are dressed too elegantly for decent taste ; and, above all, it is that insistence upon their social standing that exiles them from the class to which they wish to belong. One daughter, Olive, rebels by committing herself to the bourgeoisie ; she is too honest to bear these continual shams, and she runs off with the local dentist. Juliet, the youngest, rebels, too ; but in a more complicated fashion.
She has always been the least considered of the family ; for she is not a very explicit or obtrusive child. But she has compared with her own rather blatant surroundings the quietness and self-assurance of the household next door. It consists mainly of a housekeeper, a black cat, and old Miss Tiverton. There are trees in the garden ; the house itself is old ; Miss Tiverton is unapproachable. Juliet, confined to her own dreams, makes the Grange an imaginative symbol of the perfect taste and the contact with reality which her parents lack—the more so since her father has a cause of enmity with Miss Tiverton. Several causes, indeed : the cat keeps him awake at night, or so he imagines ; it is stuck-up of Miss Tiverton to pay no attention to the Simpsons ; and she keeps from him land upon which he wishes to build.
The rest of the tale is devoted to the flowering of Juliet, her ever-widening vision and honesty. And in the end she achieves that contact with reality which has always been her aim—and not through a love affair, as any less sensitive novelist would have insisted, or not finally through that.
The end, indeed, is the most thoughtful and genuine part of the whole novel ; it is a perfect elucidation.
The Grass Spinster, in a more robust way, is an excellent book, too. The theme is almost parallel to that of Miss Stella Benson's last novel. A girl goes to Burma to marry an Englishman, and finds him away on a punitive expedition from which he cannot return for at least four months. She has never been desperately in love with him, and she examines herself with some severity while he is away. She decides not to marry him and writes to tell him so. But the letter follows him about from village to village, and even after he has received it he has no time to read it until he is sick and wounded and lost in the mountain forests—till everything is already as black and hopeless as it could be.
The narrative of his blundering journey through these forests, gradually getting farther and farther from his base, staggering along on improvised crutches, is vividly and beauti- fully told. But, indeed, the descriptions are all good ; the psychology of natives and Europeans is well observed. In especial it is an ingenious device, excellently managed, to change from the thoughts and experiences of one character to those of another, showing by their inter-relation the chasm of egotism that separates every man from his neighbour.
The tangle is straightened, out and we are left with the prospect of a wise happiness for the two chief characters. NIr. Lowis is less epigrammatic than Miss Benson, less volatile and intoxicating, but his novel is of a much wider, a much more general truth than hers. It is probably, on the whole, a better book.
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