Fiction

3y SEAN O'FAOLAIN

T is, perhaps, and yet who knows (if one may drop into the melancholy and elliptical style of George Moore), an unwise thing for a reviewer to confess that he is not familiar with the writings of a =well-known artist. He has at best the pale consolation of not falling within the cynical epigram of the French critic who said of another French critic—II sail, tout; et it lie sail que eela. And he may console hitnself that he brings freshness .to his reading. I have not, to come to the. point, read before anything. of Miss Dorothy Richardson's, and since she has been fecund and a few pages suffice to show that she is a sincere and serious artist, I am troubled by reading, after that first glance, Mr. H: Wells' praise of her on the jacket of this new chaPter-voluine in her Miriam series : "'No one has the measure of English fiction who doesnot know her work " and M. Abel Chevalley's " . . •paraif alter le plus loin viers zinc renovation totale du roman anglais." With excitement one begins to read ; and in doubt one continues. Where, one asks; has one seen all this. before ? • - • • • , • " With 'a •single up-swinging movement, she was clear of earth and hanging, suspended and motionless, high in the sky, looking away to the right, into a far off pearly blue distance, that held her eyes, seeming to be in motion within itself ; an intense crystalline' 'Vibration that seemed to be aware. of. being .enehantedly observed; and even to be amused and saving, ' Yes, this is my reality.' She was moving, or the sky about her was moving. Masses of Pinnaeled clouds rose.between.her and the clear distance and, just as she felt herself sinking, her spirit seemed to be up amongst their high rejoicing summits. And then the little manageress was setting down -the-eoffne upon the near •table, her head turned, • while still her fingers held the rim, of the saucer, in the direction of her new destination, toward§ which her kind tired eves were sending their quizzical smile.

• Joy that up there seemed everywhere, pulsed now, confined, Within her, holding away thoughts, holding away everything' but itself. I've been up amongst the rejoicing cloud-tops,' she wrote, and sat back and sipped her coffee.' • • •

Where has one smelt the sweet odour of this narcotic before ?,

" The silence of the night grew more intense, there were millions

of small and great, and the moon now shone amidsttliavlioneeci of different birth, divided from them for ever as he wag from I his woman, whose arm touched his as they walked through the darkness, divided for aver, unable to communicate his soul to hers. Did she understand what he was feeling—the mystery of their lives written in the stars, sung by the nightingale, and breathed by the flowers ? Did she understand ? Had the convent rule left her sufficient sensibility to understand such simple human truths

' How sweetly the tobacco plant smells,' she said."

Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa are more masculine, but, they are of the same breath, the same deciduous style shedding its etiolated leaves of meaning at regular faint-falling intervals— and meaning much more in-Moore than it-ever means in Miss Richardson. " You are not in lot e with me, but with memory," Evelyn said to Owen, and so Lite and " Reality might say to Miss Richardson, or say at least " in love with your own. consciousness." • • • . There can be no question of a " renovation, totale du roman anglais." Moore rejected in the final selection for his canon this hyper-consciousness of existence, which is like the dopey eyes of the Buddha contemplating his own navel, and Joyce rejected it by going on to the hard objectivity of Ulysses from the drug of A Portrait, and Valero, the high priest of consciousness, reduced it to a logical absurdity by pointing out that the more the mind attempts to revel in its own super- fluity of experiences the more it empties itself of all exter- nality and ends by becoming a force destitute of an object. It ceases to be human. That is not to say that Miss Richardson- does not use a delicate and sensitive style, and see her passing pageant with a subtle eye for its many varieties of tone. Perhaps, as usual, it is all a matter of taste, and this reviewer is simply out of sympathy with the dim and distant seclusion of this kind of self-communion.

But novelists can be extraordinarily unaware of the con- ventions within which they work. Mr. Norman Collins writes in the good old solid naturalistic " her-stays-were-creaking " convention, as assuredly as if he had invented this way of seeing life. Here are typical emphases :

" The bedroom had a hot heavysmell ; it was as though someone • had been keeping mice there." " Her black-gloved hands were clasped on the tarnished silver knob of her tall umbrella. The only sign of emotion other than tho • movements of her fingers, as they clasped and unclasped that dubious piece of metal, was the way in which she kept wetting her lips with her tongue. It made a small dump circle in the centre of her veil."

I. His clerical collar had wriggled up round his neck and between the black silk of his waistcoat and the white celluloid of the collar a broad band of pink neck showed glaringly through . . . "

Well, well ! It is one kind of reality and Miss Riehardson's'• internal world is another, and all one can say for this conven- tion is that it makes one sigh for the days when as we first read , Beetle de Suif we banged the book and cried out with admira- tion at the sentence :

" There was also a fine piece of gruyere cheese, which had been wrapped in a newspaper, and bore the miscellaneous news ' printed • in reverse on its creamy surface."

It is a good convention, and like the nonagenarian it is " just , as strong as evernever felt better in fact," and if you haven't had enough of it, this novel of three commercial travellers, and :' the amours of two of them, will appear veritable and pene- , trating. For myself I cannot bear this modern habit of laugh- • ing at what one really feels sorry for, Mr. Chesterton says the English like to feel everything is for the best in the best of impossible worlds, and M. Maurois• says of Dickens that he , found a way of evading the charge—by making ugliness absurd so thathe could smile bravely .at it. But the moderns make their Tom Pinches absurd and break their hearts laughing at the poor wretches as Mr. Collins does at his mongrel-ragtag-and- bobtail Mr. Birdie. It is like saying—" Look at this hungry , dog. Isn't he a scream ! "

• That kind of insensitiveness, and that kindof externalisation, is not to be found in Mr. Santayana's .` Memoir in the Form of a Novel,' which is a philosophical-psychological-sociological analysis of Puritanism as seen in a diffident and somewhat unusually serious-minded young New Englander, Oliver Alden.

Santayana can be sarcastic, but with a sense of pro'- priety in the occasion ; and realistically graphic, but with a due sense of neither wishing to obtrude nor be obvious, so that both forms of restraint suggest a distinguished and well- mannered book. Fraulein Irma, sailing for America, feels she may go down to history as the governess of a President, but suddenly feels that she had better go down to her cabin. Boats tied at a landing stage are like a bunch of bananas, but one is not asked to hold one's regard on them or on the genius of the author for making such 'a clever phrase. And when Nathaniel Alden holds out a "horizontal hand" at parting with his vivacious step-sister, one sees not the obtrusive .hand but the horizontal mind of Mr. Alden. In fact, it is a weakness. in The Last Puritan, though a deliberate technique, that realism is eschewed in order to get us down to the inner reality : so that the conversations are undramatic., and the commentary frequent and discursive and the ruminations of the characters more informative than credible.

Having said which one must say that The Last Puritan is, surely, one of the few modern books that will remaini- whether as memoir or novel—grown, as it bas, out of a personal intensity of feeling no less moving in the record, and possibly more effective for being at once tranquillised by thought and expressed with an urbanity salted by 'something very like disillusion. One may or may not see Oliver Alden, but hoW fully one realises him ! His home where they discussed loftily too many opinions and people, and so emphasised his inherent • Calvinistic conscience, that awful • Puritan conscience that was at the root of his tragedy (" not content merely to under- stand but eager to govern''), refusing to let him be equivocal about anything in a most equivocal world, and opposing always his diffidence that made him want like his drug-taking . father--Peter Alden is excellent—to be one of the birds in the echelon rather than the leader, or Mrs. Murphy's child in the lap rather than Mrs. Alden's child in the carriage. It is one of the few novels I know that is subjective without being self- engaged, and there is (what a relief !) no corroding self-pity.; And if it is somewhat long and there is a good deal of philo,. sophy it is the length of an interesting book and the philosophy of an interesting philosopher.