FICTION.
PEASANT AND PRIVATE SOLDIER.
Anissia is the life-story of a Russian peasant-woman, told by herself and taken down as it left her lips. She was an ignorant, illiterate woman, scarcely self-conscious enough to be capable of reflection, and her narrative, conducted almost entirely without comment, self-analysis or artifice, is the
last word in directness.. Tolstoy took a deep interest in it, lent it the lustre of his patronage and (apparently) added the passages, which, suggesting as they do a conscious sense of
reconciliation between the suffering Anissia and the order of the universe, belong to a conception of life more organized than hers. It is strange that the entire authorship of Anissia should have been attributed to Tolstoy, for it lacks at once the sophistication of his earlier and the moral purpose of his later work. He found it wanting in idealism ; good, as a lesson, for the upper classes, but in its raw, unedited state
disturbing to the people. Consistently enough, therefore, he inserted those saving clauses, the poetry of which is not at all compromised by their " uplift."
Deprived of them, Anissia would be mutilated indeed, and yet the effect of ToLstoy's literary unscrupulousness, his deliberate economy of truth, is a distortion that, morally, it would be h.ard to justify and aesthetically hard to approve. The crying cruelty of the story cannot be appeased by these
emotional sedatives, and its special quality, a quality of continually facing facts, does not blend with them. The only escape from facts Anissia knew was that they passed away and were succeeded by others. She dealt with them as best she could, but she did not correlate them or oppose their harshness with a spiritual fortitude that was the outcome of conviction, not of habit, for she had none. Her sanguine temper enabled her to take life as it came; and, as she had no need of fatalism, so she had no need of resignation or of that beautiful sense of a harmonizing-spirit in things—the Tolstoyan correction to her practical' view of life. Had she been gifted with the power of finding_ a silver lining to her clouds she would have suffered much more than she did. Afflictions, successive and unresolved, undoubtedly induce callosities ; and in the end Anissia is able to forget her enforced marriage, the difficult births and deaths of her children, her husband's crime and his terrible death in Siberia, where she, too, had
gone, taking the children, to share his imprisonment. As easily, almost, as she shut her eyes to the future, she put the .past behind her and took another husband. Stripped of
Toistoy's glosses, the story proves, as far as it proves any- thing, the toughness and elasticity of human fibre, its ability to bend and not break, its imperviousness to the realization
of a melancholy principle underlying a series of disasters, in a word its capacity for life. Tolstoy informed the whole story with beauty by those few touches in which he shows that Anissia was alive to beauty ; but inasmuch as that sensi- bility would have brought unhappiness in its train, we think he also falsified it.
Mrs. Mitchison's stories cover the whole course of Roman history—a tremendous undertaking which she carries off so lightly as scarcely to leave a trace of the effort and research involved. Wars she sees through the private soldier's, not through the general's eye. In her account of the City of Rome there is nothing municipal, nothing purely descriptive ; it reveals itself haphazard, bit by bit. Where so many writers would have prided themselves on making its topography terribly plain, Mrs. Mitchison, none the less getting it all in, makes it agreeably confused. Always—and this is so rare in historical novels—if her characters are to observe land- marks and monuments •and details dear to the antiquary, she puts them in a state of mind conformable to the exercise of observation. She does not keep their eyes skinned and their other senses artificially stimulated to an immoderate and ill-timed intake of atmosphere. She shares Gibbon's dislike of the early Christians and her reconstructions of Archippus and Dorcas are very unkind. Whether Roman or barbarian, her characters are always clearly, if sometimes slightly, drawn They could not have stepped out of another age, their period holds them fast, and perhaps they are truer to it than to themselves. Subject as they are to every violent vicissitude, limited to a small stock of ideas and an indeterminate range of superstitions, it was a feat to give them continuity, much more outline. Mrs. Mitchison recreates and makes living relation- ships that to the layman are inconceivable ; relationships between masters and slaves, between victors and vanquished, between Christian converts and their heathen friends. She is not a sentimentalist, she can record a general massacre or an instance of acute private misery without dwelling on it, but she has sympathy and emotion. This is how Epaphras describes Archippus :-
"Suppose, now, you have two lamps, one full of oil and the other half empty, and they burn all night—they have to. Then pity the poor half-filled lamp as it feels its flame dwindle, pressing its sides together, aching, yearning ! But unless it can be filled again from the Great Oil Jar it's all to no purpose : the light droops, wanes, the wick smoulders and smokes. . . . Well, what I mean to say is this : Archippus is that poor drained lamp."
When the Bough Breaks is full of movement and colour. It has no airs and graces, no preciosity, no parade of learning, but it has an engaging eagerness and frankness, an historical sense, and the rare power of making character rise like a phoenix, and not like a skeleton from the ashes of the past. The quality that most immediately strikes one in Georgian Stories, 1924, is their cheerfulness, a cheerfulness that Mr. Wodehouse tickles into laughter and Mr. Brarnah into a very brbad smile. In the possession of this quality they differ from a contemporary and, by definition, a superior collection The Best Short Stories of 1923. To their horrors they add a relish of the supernatural or the fantastic ; Mr. Huxley succeeds brilliantly in the latter, Mr. Blackwood only moder- ately in the former. Mrs. Belloc Lowndes achieves the very rare feat of writing a good short story in -which the ghost is beneficent. Her theme is a little like that of The Turn of the Screw reversed, and she works it out with discretion and certainty of touch. The authors here represented have made it their aim to interest and amuse rather than to disturb and terrify ; they exhibit no innovations of attitude or presentation, and the change from a convention of defiance to a convention of acceptance is comforting.
L. P. HARTLEY.
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