FICTION.
DIFFICULTY AND RESPECT.
ONE reads Mr. Phillpotts with difficulty and with respect. Too often difficulty in an author engenders respect, but in the case of Mr. Phillpotts the two have no connexion. His narra- tive is troublesome to follow, because it is entrusted principally
to dialogue, a dialogue that, in spite of the directness of its Devonshire dialect, is often formal, an interchange of speeches rather than of remarks. The speakers are unhurried and long-
winded, and more anxious to make the ways of the universe plain to each other than their own minds.' At the same time, the continual richness and freshness of their idiom, their frequent humour, and the extraordinary quality of their
intercourse give their conversation a fascination of its own. The fact that it is reported, not merely summarized, enables the exact relationship of the interlocutors to show through.
Their ability to say the most intimate things without recourse to the emotional language of intimacy is very remarkable. It gives solidity and conviction to a story whose slender hold on probability needs both. Gilyan, the beauty of the village, notorious for her fickleness, extricates herself from an engage- ment of marriage by a carefully-staged attempt at suicide. She must convince others, and incidentally herself, what it costs her to break her engagement. The incident seems incredible, but Gilyan's character is not incredible. Shrewd and calculating, but not ill-natured, she indulges the pleasure of self-dramatization so freely that it becomes a vice, under- mining her common sense, and making her the never-exhausted theme of pot-house gossip. Yet she retains enough charm to make us bitterly lament the retributive punishment (if such it be) that finally overtakes her. The end is a triumph of reticence and skill, an emotional modulation so subtle and so sad that it expires on the mind like a sigh.
The book moves with a leisurely Victorian gait, an uncertain sense of direction and a lack of emphasis and accent that conceals its poetry and its humour. But how genuine they both are :—
" The missel-thrush sat aloft in the last flicker of light, where it touched the finials of the elms, as though the inflorescence yet to come already foamed there."
And what could be more engaging than the explicit declara- tion of Mrs. Purchase, absorbed in the contemplation of her last end :—
" I should like to find the subject outside death as would pleasure me."
Cheat-the-Boys is a book that will repay anyone who has time
and patience to spend on it.
(Continued on next page.) On the other hand, the rewards of reading Danger, as Mr. Poole's novel is not inaptly called, are more problematic. People who suffer, or think themselves in danger of suffering, from neurasthenia should certainly avoid it ; though it might provide a hypochondriac with some comfort as showing how long people who ought to be in an asylum can (in America at any rate) defy their relations and remain outside it. "She ought to go where she belongs" is the slightly euphemistic slogan chanted, at one time and another, by all who were unlucky enough to be intimate with Maud Brewer. A fanatical Francophil, a humanitarian in whom the milk of -kindness had gone sour, she makes of her mismanaged home for disabled soldiers a fetish to which she sacrifices the happiness of her brother and his newly-married wife. Devotion to him and jealousy of her drive Miss Brewer to desperation, crime and suicide. When the narrative finally gets the bit between its teeth we can think only in terms of the major catastrophes— childbirth, murder, execution, suicide ; the broader issues, the contrast, for instance, between the old Quaker background with its security and the nerve-ridden precarious existence of the post-War generation, are forgotten. The melodramatic reinforces the pathological interest, but without absorbing it-; and it says much for Mr. Poole's skill that whereas we should like to hate Miss Brewer as a criminal, we are obliged to pity her
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