FICTION
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENIUS
The Region Cloud. By Percy Lubbock. (Cape. 7s. &I. net.)
Mn. LUBBOCK is still, and first, a stylist. He cannot write unmusically ; but sometimes his words run away with him. His first sentence here is :—" Austin never forgot, never will forget, the .look of that long, lean hand—seen from afar, seen down the length of the big dining-parlour of the old French inn." It has the effect of appearing weak, and a little precious; which .is a pity, since there is nothing weak or precious in what Mr. Lubbock has to say. Earlhani gave him a reputa- tion as a writer of most musical and lucid prose. There his coloured shining phrases were an exact, a necessary medium for the story he was telling ; thus and thus, one felt, would be the rosy view of such a childhood, to the backward- looking eye. But a novel is a different matter. It needs an impetus, a gathering velocity, such as quiet reminiscence never asks. Yet in The Region Cloud there is no accumu- lative speed. Mr. Lubbock pursues to the end his leisurely and musical way.
It happens not to matter very much, in this particular novel ; but it will be a severe limitation if Mr. Lubbock turns to different themes. Here he has hit upon a theme most admirably suited to his metier. It is so simple, so apparently slight, that to reduce it to a sentence or two and not lose the best of its import is impossible. Channon, the painter, is an insatiable genius, and all is grist to his omnivorous mill. " He's forced to sweep away everything he has no use for, simply in order to Clear the time and the room that he needs.
It's a magnificent sight, if you can stand It was young Austin's agony that he couldn't stand it. Therein he differed from all those others—the Lady Cordelias, who sacrificed everything that they might shine for a day in his presence and then be forgotten, and the Btunpuses, who wanted him to stroke their flattery and who gave him of their millions in return. Austin had too much pride for that, too much life of his own. That was why, in the moonlit square of the old French town, Channon had picked him up, as it were, and carried him -Off to Bintworth, that tomb of all the others whom he had picked up to serve his genius and dropped again. For a time; all seemed to go well there with Austin as secretary. " You live your- own life in your brain," said Channon, " and it's a real- and since you've been here I've had reality beside me--I never bad it before."• He didn't know then that it wasn't reality:he Wanted to serve him, nor genius--however less than his own ; but willing sacrifices—like Mrs. Bewley who, now that she had served. her. purpose, could glory in a memory, or like Mrs. Channon herself, content just to be beautiful, a radiant picture in the setting her husband gave her. So, after a glowing year, even Austin had— to be thrown away with the rest.
Such a tenuous theme-Was all that Mr:' Lubbock needed ; he can probe at leisure all the psychological ramifications of this curious impact of geniuses ; and his measured delightful prose can, and does, plume itself on every page. The setting, too, is magnificently done and quite unlaboured—Bintw, iUs. in its beauty, is another Earlhatn.- Eveh the.minor characters, as they flit in and out of the-sten?, are most intimately known. Only Austin fails a little. And 'that is the fault of Mr. Lub- bock's method of story-telling : the narrative is neither quite impersonal nor quite in Austin's_ own thought ; it is mixture of the two ; and the result is that, while the objectified characters are clear as noonday, Austin himself remains evasive and thin. But The Region Cloud is a fine and an important novel. That Mr. Lubbock was amazingly familiar with all the techniques of novel-making, his exhaustive Craft of Fiction had already 'proved ; but that he wOuld.. be so successful a working novelist we had not guessed. Orle can only hope that he will find other theme4 as intimate, quiet, and congenial as this.
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