Fiction
First Novels
Press. 7s. 6d.) The Man Within. By Graham Greene. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) Asrarnow is a laudable quality in a writer. Yet the first novel that is inspired by big aims is likely to be a less satisfying product in itself than one which attempts no heights or pro- fundities. This statement applies emphatically to Dewar Rides, which is remarkably interesting as promise, but very imperfect as fulfilment. Mr. Strong has essayed a novel on the epic scale. A disciple of Thomas Hardy, or perhaps still more of the modem peasant novelists of Scandinavia, he has sought to present the tragic development of a man of the soil against a grim—almost a determining—background of Nature. The scene is a village, representing the last human stronghold, on a wild fringe of Dartmoor, where spring does not triumph until weeks after it has established itself in the valleys, and where every civilizing influence has won a tardy and precarious victory.
True representative of his environment, Dick Brendon, with kis contradictory brow and jowl that indicate a quarrel in his blood, resists every attempt to make him a gentleman. First, Mrs. Grayson, a refined if self-seeking lady of the valley, gives him his chance. During a birds'-nesting adventure Dick has defended her clever but physically weak son from the scorn of his companions ; and, seeing in him a promising guardian for her Eric, she sends Dick at her expense to the best apology for a polite school which the district provides. The boyhood's days of Dick and Eric are admirably and con- vincingly described. But Dick, as he grows older, degenerates from -a recognizsable human being into a hero of melo- dranha. It is believable that the love of a girtlike Ruth should turn his:head, and that he should gradually go from bad to worse. Yet the actual process of his demoralization fails to carry conviction. It is not that' Mr. Strong has no sense of character. He has a very true and lively sense of it ; he already excels, indeed, in still portraiture. But he cannot make his characters develop. They do not move naturally, but jump violently from-one phase to another. If Mr. Strong can overcome this difficulty he should do notably good work. His vision is both large and minute ; he conveys atmosphere ; and his descriptive gifts are far'above the average.
The Helmers is in its very different way equally ambitious. It is, however, so unusual a book that its actual achievement will be very variously assessed. It is loaded=perhaps over- loaded—with acute objectivity ; yet- the core of the story is essentially reflective, while even its: outwarddetail, separably vital, is subdued in the mass to vagueness by the writer's consistently gentle and melodious style. Miss Landi has attempted to present the inmost heart of Valentina Helmer, a sensitive girl of mixed Hungarian and English bloOd. During her idyllic childhood in Bavaria, tenderly and sometimes exquisitely described, Val has many playmates ; but" William," the creation of her own imagination, is her truest comrade of all. When -in adolescent years she comes to live-in-London, she is surprised to learn that she has a cousin William, who, from the accounts given her, closely resembles the ideal companion of her invention. But, by a series of accidents, she never meets the real William, and at last that jolly naval officer is killed in the War ; while his brother, a cripple and a poet, who falls in love with her, also dies. Val, having unexpectedly inherited money, drifts back to Bavaria and plays the good angel to the poor, simple folk who befriended her early years. The epilogue resolves itself, indeed, into something like a German fairy tale. Here is a curious story, full of beautiful day-dreams and softened actuality. We shall await Miss Landi's next novel with particular interest.
The charmed circle of Miss Ferguson's title is anything but charming. Some inhibition, some fatal limitation, binds the whole Deane family, forbidding it to escape from itself. Their self-imprisonment is accentuated when the old country house in which they have settled becomes shut in by the squalor of a rapidly expanding manufacturing town. Dr. Deane, after an illness that compels him to retire from practice, develops into a gloomy eccentric, whose narcotic is incessant reading. His wife, with her ambitions thwarted, finds an outlet for hes energy and self-importance in domineering over her two daughters and cossetting her wastrel son, Both daughters rebel in their very different ways ; but the final chapter finds them marooned again within, the unyielding environment. If the story is depressing, it is at all events efficiently and uncomfortably real.
Mr. Benson's fidelity to truth is no less sound ; but it is approached more subtly and with irony. The Hogarth Press Can be relied upon to give us books that shatter our equani- mities, and The Foreigner in the Family assaults, among many other conventions, our smug insularity. The foreigner in question is Robert de Boncourt, whom Helen Symthe- Jackson marries while visiting Paris. Helen is the daughter of a Kentish manor-house family, whose lineage, however, can be traced not to the Plantagenets or the Stuarts, but to a group of multiple drapery stores along the South Coast.. Her fears that there may be complications when she takes. home her French husband are abundantly fulfilled. Robert is not merely misunderstood, but, when a scandal shocks the village, suspicion at once falls upon him. After a lively comedy of errors and of manners, Robert- finally emerges as the gentle- man, and the Vicar's son as the rogue. We are -trenchantly reminded that the English pattern of a gentleman is not the only possible one.
Mr. Greene has chosen a narrow compass, but moves therein with certainty and ease. The Man Within is an exceptionally fresh and readable story of Sussex in the smuggling days. The narrative is brisk ; the setting, with its incidental glimpses of rural and country-town life, is picturesque -but historically convincing ; while the two main characters—Andrews, smuggler and " informer," with his dual nature, and Elizabeth, an ideal (but not sentimentalited) type of pure, serene, brave womanhood—are so vitally delineated that the closing tragedy comes with intense poignancy.
GM.BERT THOMAS.
Previous page
