Fiction

By SEi(N O'FAOLAIN

Full House. By M. J. Farrell. (Collins. 7s. Gd.)

Not for Heaven. By Dorothy 1Vieeleary. (Barker. Is. Gd.) Or a futility like that of the scholastic who wondered how many angels could dance on the point of a needle is it to compare various kinds of excellence—Hermes and a Totem pole, George Sand and George Robey, Phil May and Fru, Angelico. This is true even of things of a like nature, such as novels. People may look at the same object and see in it such utterly different worlds : people may look at an object and see no world at all. We have to be satisfied if they see anything and tell us about it in fitting and moving words or in amusing words.

Miss M. J. Farrell's very ably written Full House is interest- ing for two reasons : because it entertains rind even moveaone,

and because it raises a sufficiently interesting critical problem. A young woman wants to marry a young man, and she has a mad brother and he had a mad grandfather : they are of the class of the Irish country Big Houses, which have always been a little crazy or wild or daredevil or harum-scarum, or anything else eighteenth-ecnturyish that you may like to call them. And this Big House is by the sea and the mountains, and touches on other Big Houses, one with a lunatic's water- garden, another that has been empty for ten years and has

cobwebs in the bathrooms and fungoid mushrooms growing; through the floor ; there are unmarried daughters in these

houses and the mad brother, temporarily, or perhaps per- manently, restored to sanity, wanders about and has a pas- sionate love affair with a woman who has had an unhappy life.. . Clearly you could do anything with such material if you were able enough. It is a cosmos. It is a storm. It is a world in itself.

Can one then complain because Miss Farrell has made it a storm in a tea-cup ? Some painters turn their backs on the landscape they wish to draw and look at it in a little diminish- ing mirror, where everything is reduced to miniature, and turned the other way round ; it gives freshness to a familiar view, and I know a painter who always looks under his arm at a landscape. Miss Farrell has done something like this—looks at her mad world in miniature and the other way round. She does more. She draws all the foreground detail with care and

indicates all the big features with mere line or two, if, indeed, she doesn't leave them out altogel her. In other words, she is not Emily Bronte—she is one of the curates out of Shirley.

Well, is it good enough ? At first it is, I think, so much more than good enough as to be perfect. Lady Bird in the

garden meeting Eliza who has conic to help with the home- coming of John from the asylum is perfect. Markle, Lady Bird's little son, is and remains throughout a lovely and real and moving child. But, then, Lady Bird

goes off to meet the once-mad John, and . . . curtain. We next see John at dinner. John opens a violent flirtation with Eliza and . . . curtain. Rupert, the young man with the mad grandfather, has sisters who decide to tell Sheena, his young lady, about the madness in his family and to beg her not to marry Rupert. We see Rupert's sister approach, Sheena and . . . curtain. These examples of

evasion are illustrative. For whereas these larger features of the picture arc treated so lightly, pages are devoted to the tennis-party and the Nurses' Fête, and pages on pages to the governess with her depilatories and her wan eagerness

for a bit of life. And where in two " big " scenes Sheena and Rupert meet, and he implores her to run away with him, and again implores her to marry him, it is not so much a grande rise as a crise de nerfs.

' And yet there is a lovely sense of the countryside in this book, and a tenderness and a great sympathy, and a wistful- ness. But still I do think that there are some themes too big

to be made a mere background for Nurses' Fetes and Tennis Parties, and that such a mixture destroys any kind of excel- lence. Fragonard didn't paint butchers' shops.

But neither did Rembrandt paint Sistine chapels: Mr. Thomas Wolfe, whose main, perhaps sole, allinity to Rembrandt is his kind of obscurity, is very far from Miss Farrell, farther could not be possible, for the cosmic value At his material which she-rejectsdoes not' even see, -:.-intetesth him so profoundly that he is almost left inarticulate by if. Ernest :Boyd has a. picture of Dreisei visiting- him one night

and sitting by the fire, twisting a handkerchief between his hands and uttering heavy but sincere platitudes about Life being a mystery : it might have been a picture of MO.

Wolfe, whose large book is an extraordinary farrago of realistic descriptions, subjective musings, and implorations of lir Universe in a wild Whitmanesque bellowing. His book, over 900 pages in length and contains upwards of half LT million words. It is the second volume of a Work (of which

the first volume, Look Homeward, Angel, has already appeared) which will, when completed, contain six volumes and, at the

present rate, six million words. One may well stand amazed before such fecundity, but there seems very little reason to admire it except as an awful curiosity of the literature 'a our times, For in the main this is a waste of words, and small care has been given to their use. In a page and a half, for instance, I come successively on " frozen cataleptic silence ",; " a tomb of frozen silence " ; " blazing bill-beplas-

tered silence " ; " cataleptic . squares of silence " ; " upon those cataleptic pavements the cataleptic silence "7-and oil every third page, as it seems to the recollection, such invoca- tions as, " Oh ! What a land, a life, a time, that was

or, " What is Ulla strange and bitter miracle of life ? prolonged, sometimes, for 'pages on pages. On occasion the ingenuousness of it is painful ; this example is typical. t4-.

" It seemed to him that the glorious moment for which his whole life had been shaped, and toward which every energy and desire in his spirit had been turned, was now here.•. As that incredible knowledge came to him, a fury, wild, savage', wordless, pulsed through his • blood, and . filled him with such a swelling and exultant joy as he had hover known before. He felt the savage, tongueless cry of pain and joy swell up and thicken in his throat, he felt a rending and illimitable power in him as if he could twist steel between his fingers, and he felt an almost uncontrollable impulse to yoll.into the faces of the men with a demonic glee.

Instead he just sat down quickly with an abrupt, half-defiant movement, lit his cigarette,' and spoke to one Of the men quickly and diffidently, saying : • Hello, Mr. Flood.'

Lest anyone should think the occasion warranted such "wild, savage fury "—not ." wordless " in the ease- of Mt. Wolfe !—it is, in fact, nothing More than the occasion of the hero's entry into a Pullman smoking-car. And lest, further- more, anyone should think the occasion and the style of its description is isolated, it goes on, on the contrary, in this way from beginning to end, broken only by those realistic descrip- tions to which I have referred, which are the best things in

the bop': and which seem to indicate, frankly, the slight and Only kind of talent which Mr. Wolfe commands.

' No ! Miss Farrell is wiser in her generation, if not wise to perfection.. But wiser than either is our third novelist, Miss Dorothy McCleary. Writing in the quieter American tradition, she is a modern Chardin. Her novel of simple people in the Middle West is a very pleasing bas-relief, done obviously by a finished shOrt:story writer and in the techniqUe

Of the short-story : for very little happens, there is hardly any development of character, and the high lights only appear high by contrast.' Here we have a writer who knows what she can and cannot do. She can create real people and she can feel with them emotionally, and she can see the beauty of simple life and startle and charm us by the revelation of it.

Everybody in this book is alive--the old as with her garden and her horse, Ned, whom she treats as a human being her son in the store in Chicago and his girl-wife ; the friend Of her youth who typifies for her " the good old days " and who comes back, so changed as to ruin the memory of them.

is the same with the little incidents through which the book movesthe return of the son with his wife, or the abso lutely real scene where Ned, the mare, has taken ill from the rain on the stable-roof and has to be given a bolus while the old woman speaks in the rough natural way of the countryside 'and the refined city-bred daughter shrinks from her actions and her words. Miss McCleary knows she can do all this well and she has done it well. Whether or not she can take a higher flight I do riot knoW ; here; at any rate, she has not attempted it and one is content to see something accomplished with entire ..mastery. over the . method and material.