Fiction •
Country Life
The Bailiff Verney. By Ivan Cankar. (Rodker. as.) Down in the Valley. By H. W. Freeman. (Chatto and Windus.
7s. 6d.)
Turn Back the Leaves. By E. M. Delafield. (Macmillan.
7s. 6(1.)
Dominance. By Oswald Harland. (Knopf. 7s. 6cL) - Dr. Serocold. By Helen Ashton. (Bonn. 7s. 6d.)
THERE is in The Bailiff Yerney an echo of the manner of the Tolstoyan parables, but neither a somewhat fervid intro- duction nor the assurance of the publisher convinces one that Ivan Cankar was " a Slovene Tolstoi." He unquestionably had remarkable promise, which was denied fulfilment by his early death ; but in this tale about an aged peasant's vain search for justice and his violent revenge one sees that Ivan Canker was still a man harping on one string with no great subtlety. The bailiff, after a lifetime's labour for an old master, is turned out of the house at the master's death by the son. Unable to comprehend the situation, the servant sees only that he has been defrauded of the fruits of a lifetime's work. What he has built with his own hands is surely his ? He takes to the roads and passes from town to town seeking justice, to be confronted at every turn by the cynicism of the _law. His innocent protest that the fields he has cultivated are his because of his labour and sweat is met with derision. Twice he is imprisoned. The criminals laugh at him. Failing to get a hearing from the Emperor in Vienna, he goes at last to a priest to ask judgment of God. But God is on the aide of the police and the judges. Defrauded at every step, the mad bailiff returns to his late master's house and sets fire to it. If he cannot enjoy what is his by the right of his labour, he can destroy it. But the angry peasantry seize him and throw him into the flames. The fault of the book is that the episodes in which the bailiff talks with successive mayors and judges are obvious and repetitive without duly increasing the emotional stress, But the book has the fresh, magnified simplicity of the parable and ought to be read.
In Mr. Freeman's new novel we do not swing perilously between the heaven and earth of parable, or stir up a quarrel between the relative and, the absolute. The Englishman who, as Seilor Madariaga has pointed out, thinks with every part Of his body except his head, is content to leave such matters to the Slovenes. It is after all the people of the East who were advised to consider the lilies of the field : Mr. Freeman's Suffolk peasantry remain stolidly in contemplation of their neighbours, the dartboard and the broccoli. He tells how a young business man comes gradually under the spell of the land and, by far too easy stages, passes from a little modest gardening to the great struggle and marriage with the soil. One's difficulty with Mr. Freeman's book is that its characteri- zation is poor and the manipulation of the plot too jerky. The whole business is just a little too gond to be true. There are two women in the book. The love of the young man for one of them advances, according to strict pastoral convention, with the • seasons, and is rather beautifully posed. His relation with the other woman, his unhappily married house- keeper, has possibilities in it which Mr. Freeman has not allowed to develop until too late. The merit of the book lies in the pages which describe the young man's awakening zest for physical labour, his ploughing, digging and scything ; and the deep, sober tranquillity of the rural vales.
Country life, or rather county life, is the background of Miss E. M. Delafield's story, but it is there by implication and not by Statement. By a series of rapid, maliciously witty sketches she can Suggest a whole world without being in the necessity of filling in the outlines. Her art is that of the caricaturist. The victims in Turn Back the Leaves are a family of religious fanatics, whose decay is traced from the 'nineties to the present day. Sir Joseph Floyd is a rigid and impoverished Roman Catholic who is gradually sinking into religious mania. His wife, after a 'catastrophic episode of Unfaithfulness, bears him several daughters and then miserably dies. The daughters,. brought up with the utmost religious severity and allowed no knowledge of the world or anything else, grow up in a Protestant community with which they are, scarcely allowed any contacts, Two of them renounce their faith in fivottr. of marriage to Piotit,tants, one becomes a nun, the prettiest stays with her raving father-, who believes
• that the decay of the family is his punishment for having renounced the priesthood in favour of marriage. His heir is killed in the War. Miss Delafield's malice is very enjoyable ; her dialogue is extraordinarily good. She excels in portraying women of the stupid, slow-witted and empty-headed kinds ; there are some clever scenes between a nurse and a governess in the opening chapters. In some respects, like a book of caricatures, Turn Back the Leaves is unsatisfying ; further, being a chronicle, it suffers from the dispersal of interest over a number of characters, and, owing to the pace of the narrative, one is not allowed to linger over any one of them. They flash for a moment like the pictures in an albtun, and vanish as the rapid pages fly back.
If Miss Delafield has simplified life too glibly, Mr. Harland has twisted and tangled it until it is unrecognizably obscure. He is obsessed, like his governing character, a dominating and evil old merchant, with certain theories about pattern which belong more properly to the art of painting. As it stands, Dominance is a simple, melodramatic theme, rendered highly indigestible both by Mr. Harland's contorted prose and:his tortuous approach. The scene of the story is in a North Country seaport where an evil-minded old merchant makes a will which will enable him to govern the likes of his illegitimate son, his niece, his brother and the friends in the artistic circles in which they move, after his death. All depends upon the acceptance of the son. He hesitates. The niece, a wild young woman whom he is required to marry, takes a lover. The stage is at last cleared, by murders and suicides, for the marriage of the son with one of those promiscuous but " so essentially virginal " ladies with whom fiction is so attractively populated. The whole mixture of laborious melodrama and metaphysics into which the roving minds of the various characters are permitted to flash their electric torches to add to the confusion is a monument to an intellect that is bothered by the fascination of what is difficult." The maddening thing about Mr. Harland is that he could obviously write a very powerful novel indeed, if he remembered that it is a novelist's business to digest his theories on life and art thoroughly before putting pen to paper ; and that in making English prose it is the pen and not the painter's brush nor the sculptor's chisel that is used.
' Miss Ashton takes us through twenty-four hours of the life of a country doctor, from the small hours of one morning where he sits at the death-bed of his partner, round again to midnight where he attends the birth of a child. He is a dispassionate man of sixty-five who sees people chiefly in terms of their medical history and looks upon happiness and distress with indifferent equanimity. He goes his rounds, irritated by the presence of a young competitor, amused by the reactions of a village spinster to the fact that her maid is going to have an illegitimate child, gives in his report at-the Town Hall to a collection of local characters, perforins-• a difficult operation, finds a woman he has been in love with dying of cancer, urges a marriage—one would think a most unusually lively day for a country doctor. The book has no plot. It is held together in the doctor's mind, which Miss Ashton has imagined with considerable skill, and it suffers from being seen from his fatigued and undistinguished
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