FICTION
PIANO QUINTET
MR. SACKVILLE WEST'S very remarkable first novel presents one or two interesting problems. Five people, a woman and four men, make a tour of the Continent as a piano quintet. They cannot get away from each other ; their music provides no escape, for it is in playing that they are most keenly aware of each other. So close are they, they seem to pass in and out of each other's lives, at times becoming indis- tinguishable; and yet each possesses a hard core of personality that the rest cannot apprehend, much less penetrate. As the tour proceeds, tension tightens. Imogen's passion for Aurelian grows blind to everything but itself, blasting the too sensitive soul of Melchior, making shadows of Lionel and Barnaby. Aurelian withdraws, holds off ; she cannot get at him ; she makes her feeling for him explicit, paining herself and him ; but she gets nothing in return but reasonableness, kindness, and the statement of a theory of relationships which, if followed out, would defeat life itself. For a time Imogen had been able to make Aurelian the mirror of her own passion ; but directly a real response was needed, directly his being became alive to hers, it acted for itself, invulnerable and inviolable. She could have no lot or part in it.
Thus throughout the story we see worked out on parallel lines a system of relationships, superficially intimate, funda- mentally thwarted and groping. The characters make every effort to reach each other, they catch a meaning in a look or gesture, they succeed in expressing what one had imagined inexpressible. The scenery in which the action takes place is described with a feverish vividness and a poetic exactitude of phrase : Paris, Berlin, Vienna, the scent, sound and aspect of them, even the feel and taste of them, Mr. Sackville West brings home to us. The objects of sensory perception are realized to the full, so that even when not meant to be symbols the force of the description makes them so. One feels that the inanimate world no less than the music of Rosenkavalier or the Franck Quintet is the characters of the story ; they are as much present in sights and sounds as in the husks of flesh called Imogen and Aurelian. And, really, it is in their transformations, their multiplied metempsychoses, that we can apprehend them best. Their conversation does not reveal them, or only partially. The dialogue is petulant, informal, familiar ; at times seemingly trivial, the bickering of overstrained people. Talk gets them nowhere ; it cannot advance the gradual encroachment, the ingression of one soul into another which is Imogen's deepest desire and Aurelian's deepest aversion.
Thus, in spite of the tremendous complexity and subtlety of its execution, Mr. Sackville West's story is a kind of essay in simplification ; the presentation of characters actuated by one idea, the conscious realization and enjoyment of an instinct towards identification—the instinct persisting, the consciousness unable to give an account of it in terms of ordinary life. It is an attempt to split the atom, to resolve the emotional element " love " into something more refined and absolute. Mr. Sackville West begins where most writers leave off ; where they would have had recourse to mysticism he pursues his analysis and gives another turn to the emotional screw. There is both morbidity and hysteria in his work, but its inspiration is neither morbid nor hysterical ; it lies in an individuality of outlook and a power of imagination that are certainly original and at times affect one like genius.
Ile both underrates and overrates, we think, the power of the spoken word ; underrates its effect upon the convictions, overrates its effect upon the nerves. But, if he does not enlarge the scope of consciousness at least he beats against its bounds ; and though the effort and strain of his pioneering sometimes lack the repose of art, they have traced the outlines of one as yet unexplored region in which art might easily find a home.
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