A LOVER AT FORTY.*
THERE is an unpleasant flavour in A Lover at Forty. It is set down in malice. Because of that Mr. Cumberland is not a great artist. He has not created beauty out of his malicious subjects, but always conveyed the uncomfortable feeling that his work is even uglier than his characters. He is aloof from them, but he is not sympathetically aloof ; he is sneeringly aloof. We know nothing of Mr. Cumberland as a man, but as an artist he is contemptuous of men and bitterly hates women. There are no generous emotions in A Lover at Forty, none of those splendid illuminations of the apparently ugly that can make art out of realism. His men are women-ridden fools or foolish moralists of the type that for so many years reasoned us out of the St.. James's Theatre. His women are mean, sensual, avaricious, cunning, altogether loathsome. The one woman to whom he has given some good qualities never comes to life. It seems as if Mr. Cumberland can only create those others. And how superbly he does create them ! They live. If, like Mr. Cumber- land, we may allow ourselves the echo, they so terribly live. We have met Mrs. Colefax and her daughter. We have felt the horror of their hatred, of their towering selfishness, of their calculating lust. We feel contaminated by their moral and mental ugliness. Even the most human and lovable vices arc made ugly in them. We hate them almost as much as they hate one another. We, too, are horribly pleased at Mrs. Colefax's disgrace and failure, but we are sorry that her daughter should enjoy the triumph. A Lover at Forty is a book to read. It is a book to build and destroy theories upon. It is the psychological novel, full of the jargon of psycho-analysis, ruthlessly true to the ugliness of ugliness, and it is difficult to decide whether it is art or simply a painful document on neurosis. We almost forget to admire Mr. Cumberland's technique and insight in the anger and disgust that he produces in us. Surely this cannot be art. Anything, however ugly, may be the subject of art, but art must flood it with beauty or significance, or what- ever word you will that conveys that quality which prevents us being angry or disgusted with any character, and that makes us for the moment, in the superb sense, godlike. Mr. Cumberland only stirs what he would call our censor.
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