FICTION.
CONTRASTS.
Tony. By Stephen Hudson. (Constable. Os.)
No one who finds pleasure in a vivid contrast could better satisfy his craving than by reading, successively, Mr. Stephen Hudson's Tony and Miss Jones's Inigo Sandys. It is a transi- tion from noonday to twilight, from the coarse to the sensitive, from the explicit to the implied. Only in one particular does Tony challenge the elusiveness of its successor, and that is in the form of its narration. It is told conversationally by a man to his brother ; whether speaking from beyond the grave, as the conclusion seems to suggest, we are unable to decide. At times in the history of Inigo Sandys also an interlocutor creeps in, a very vague " you," an alter ego, in fact,of Inigo himself, whose place and function are relegated to memory or to forming a liaison between the central conscious- ness and the corporate consciousness of Mr. Jones's readers. When the difficulties and ambiguities attendant upon its scheme of narration have been set aside, all likeness between Tony and Inigo Sandys comes to an end.
Inigo himself is one of the people Tony would have loathed, and, had their paths ever crossed at Cambridge, Inigo would certainly have counted Tony among his " slums," as he called those of his acquaintance whom he least delighted to honour. Tony is, with one lapse, a • complete' cynic. His vocabulary, which the author's method allows to attain its full colloquial
maturity, has in it a smack of the sergeant-major's and the schoolboy's ; but the continual offensiveness of its idiom can have few parallels, one would think, in real life. One hesitates to call it vulgar because it transcends vulgarity It is necessary to dwell on this question of diction because the peculiar flavour of Tony is wrapped up in it. The story is a squalid one ; the characters, with two or three exceptions, so disreputable as scarcely to be interesting ; any sharpness of situation is lost either through the oblique narration or through the comprehensible reticence of Tony himself. He is explicit enough about his brother, to his brother, often reminding him (an awkwardness inherent in the presentation) of incidents with which his brother must have been more familiar than he. But over his own life he draws a series of veils. ," It was when I came my last awful mucker," is his way of giving the dates and landmarks to his career. But there is something disarming and engaging about him that impels one to hold one's nose and follow to its very bitter end his unsavoury history. Only once does his charm fail. He is sentimental about his son and his son's death. It may be a harsh judgment, but the sentimentalism of pro- fessed cynics is a spectacle from which one shrinks. Tony
is a tour de force. The life of a man-about-town has been often described ; the life of the " smart set," as it was in Edwardian and early Georgian times, alternately spurning and deferring to the money-bags of Jewish financiers, has not been neglected in fiction ; there have been more faithful portraits of self-seeking demi-mondaines than Elinor and more subtle portraits of rascality than Tony. Benvenuto Cellini was at once less gross and more sophisticated. The vitality of the book lies in its jargon, in those outrageous sentences none of which but flaunts a cardinal affront to the English language but which are almost unmatched in the expression of direct censure and vituperation.
The characters in Inigo Sandys, on the other hand, even Jocelyn the least sympathetic and most downright of them, are of an exquisite sensibility. They make every allowance for each other ; they meet each other half-way ; they are alive to the significance of the slightest gesture. Their technique of intercourse and conversation might find its counterpart in some ideal family in whose speech definiteness of outline has long passed away, leaving nothing more articulate than eloquent single words, inflexions, pauses, silence. Memory plays a great part in their consciousness ; a scent, a contact, a dream, serves to set it astir. After the modern fashion Miss Jones makes the recollection of past experience an accompaniment of action and even of dialogue, so that the sense of time is generally vague. The characters present to each other their full personalities, trailing all the known accretions of the past and the previsaged accretions of the future. Like clouds, they seem to have no core, and they mngle or avoid each other as easily as clouds. And yet, nebulous as they are, they contrive to leave a sediment, they even achieve a subdued vividness. Naturally, in the barrage of suggestion and inference it is not easy to detect the simple motions of the will when the will has been so corrupted, so " got at " or (perhaps it would be fairer to say) so disciplined and refined by its long servitude to good manners and fine feeling. And, as in Henry James, it comes with something of a shock to find that a character so civilized as Kate Croy should be actuated, at bottom, by a motive for which avarice is not too hard a name, so here we are brought up sharp by the reason for Inigo's estrangement from Jocelyn. Surely her disinclination (even after marriage) to live with him showed a scrupulousness which Inigo, so alert to sympathize with delicate gradations of behaviour, might have approved. But it horrified him.
Perhaps the best part of this intricate and fascinating book is the description of Inigo's life at Cambridge. There, in the artificial constriction of University fife Miss Jones's talent for playing cat's-cradle with human relationships comes into its own ; and, since hypersensitiveness is a mark of adolescence, his absorption in it gains a validity which is less obvious later on. Only to mention one point, Inigo's preoccupation with sincerity, in himself and others : how admirably Miss Jones depicts it, the self-examination, half humorous and half agonized, the desire to do everyone justice, even one's self. It is pleasant to think that the conscientiousness of the hero is reproduced in the craftsmanship of the book ; among much
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that is minute, even microscopic, there is hardly a detail that is trivial.
Miss Jones compromises continually ; Mr. Harwood never compromises at all. His emotional fibre is -tougher than Mr. Hudson's, which is saying a great deal. His position in regard to life is more central than theirs. Mr. Hudson exploits an attitude ; Miss Jones unfolds a consciousness ; but Mr. Har- wood marshals his facts. This impartiality makes him seem sometimes a little cruel. Will nothing, one asks oneself, intervene between the facts and his presentation of them ; no faint bias or more personal trait, snobbery, humanitarianism, no evidence of human weakness ? We can find none. Most short stories have their mots in sentimentalism or inverted sentimentalism ; they-ara sweet or bitter. Mr. Harwood has found a recipe which makes them neither. Fantastic, roman- tic, realistic, allegorical, they submit with a good grace to all the literary labels ; but they have not tolerated in their composition the smallest intrusion of the public or of the author. Admirably written, with an economy that bewilders by its deftness, they are all that their wrapper claims for them and more. One could write at length upon the author's almost uncanny familiarity with the most diverse walks of life, Upon his ear for dialogue which gives a rare appropriateness to each word his characters utter ; upon the colour of his stories and the shadow, the violence and the calm. Only theirs is a type of excellence which, though not frigid nor remote, definitely needs an approach, an open mind and an unflagging attention if they are to have the effect they should have. One hm to accustom oneself to their intellectuality, which is comparable to -Mr. Aldous Huxley's, and scarcely less amusing, unlit/Ugh, unlike his, it has no declared mission to amuse. One has to accustom oneself to the fact that in many of them the purely narrative element plays a minor part ; the sense of things happening, the sense of actuality, gives way to a more abstract conception of events, in which the interest of relationship overrides the interest of sequence. Mr. Harwood's stories are the work of a powerful mind, tenacious and naturally selective. They have charm, but even more than charm, they have strength.
Mr. Mais's chief defect is the verycommon one of not knowing when to stop. His dialogue is good when it does not run away with him, but it is not good enough to be treated as an end in itself. The lure cannot entirely clear himself of the taunt of his protegee, Felicity ; he is a grown-up boy scout. But he takes the blows of fortune, of which she is perhaps the chief, with a good heart, and it is not unpleasant to follow him through some if not all of his adventures.
L. P. Hastrimr.
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