FICTION.
KNUT HADISUN'S characters never entirely leave their childhood behind. Their emotions remain unmixed, curiously single, even when, as here in Children of the Age, the theme is only indirectly concerned with childhood. The absorption of a great territorial estate by a successful man of business, the bitter estrangement between its owner and his German wife, the problem of the heir's education, unsatisfactorily solved at an English Public School, these are matters for maturity, men's matters. But they are not treated as such. The nobody who left Segelfoss to make his way in the world and returned rich enough to buy up the manor is no ordinary money-grubber : like his fellow-townsmen we feel him to be a portent, fabulous, mysterious, in fact (as they called him) a "King." The disagreement between the lieutenant and his wife is no vulgar matrimonial squabble, but a collision between fairies. And when Young Wfilatz sets off for Harrow we feel that he might be going to the world's end, the journey and the
change of life loom so prodigious. To us the characters, in no feeble or ineffective sense, seem to be playing at life ; they go through the motions and gestures prescribed by modern civilization, but their hearts are far away. There is always a discrepancy between their apparent prosaic pre- occupations and their secret impulses and longings. They are indeed children, but they are not of the age.
The book itself has the simplicity and intimacy and pro- fundity characteristic of Hamsun's work, and the same clear twilight atmosphere. It has little of the ecstasy and the lyrical quality of Victoria ; its issues are not always distinct, and it is, as a whole, put together loosely. The 'climaxes come straggling in instead of huddling close upon each other. But in detail it is rare and full of magic. There is always some- thing noble in these angular characters, forever teaching their sorrows to be proud, ready to forgo anything rather than a misunderstanding, wounding each other.
The daily round, the common task which furnish inadequate fare for Hamsun's Norwegians are a full meal to Miss Canfield's Americans. It is true that Lester Knapp was a miserable failure in business, and therefore in his own eyes and in the eyes of his neighbours a failure in life. The identification between life and business, or rather (to do Miss Canfield justice) between life and its recognized manifestations,the pursuits and avoca- tions that go to make it up, is complete. The people in The Home-Maker are " out " to "make good " ; life is a challenge to them, and they feel that success is only a matter of finding a square hole for a square peg. At the start the pegs are in the wrong holes. Mr. Lester's incompetence is the despair of his employer at the store ; his wife, a conscientious and a Roman mother, has worn out her nerves trying to make her house clean and wholesome for her delicate and unruly children. The opening chapters which show her involved in this forlorn attempt are perhaps the best in the book. Her good inten- tions, her wrong-headedness, the exasperation she caused and suffered, are admirably portrayed. But the solution to the tangle, for its very -completeness, is less convincing. " Fired " from his job, her husband attempts suicide ; but his incapacity for life prevents his leaving it. The suicide, too, is a failure, and he gets a broken back for his pains. His wife enters the store, shows innate business capacity and becomes a pillar of provincial commerce ; the husband, confined to his bed, educates his children, softens them and draws out the minis- tering qualities which were (in the youngest) very latent indeed. The book doses with general jubilation that. Mr. Lester's illness, though not fatal, is incurable : he will never again have to go out into the world. It is the triumph of sentiment over morality. Happiness, in Miss Canfield's view, is obtain- . able, first of all, by earning one's living physically, and, if that fails, by earning it spiritually ; but it can be obtained, or the fault is not the world's, but ours. The Home-Maker is written with great conviction and gusto, but its effect as a work of art
• is compromised by a manipulation of events which does not matter much, and a manipulation of reassuring and uplifting consequences which matters more. But it is an impressive and powerful piece of work.
The Spanish Farm is a study of the War, told through the experience of the daughter of a Franco-Flemish farmer, living just behind the lines. The woman's character is ably and even brilliantly drawn, with concessions perhaps to a preconceived idea but none to facility or to sentimentality. Madeleine is in the main an unattractive figure, with her shrewd eye to business, her cunning, her purposefulness, her completeness and want of idealism. Even her resolution and single-mindedness have a quality that repels. Calculation dominates her in thought and action ; her two love-affairs are before anything else deliberate. Mr. Mottram has been marvellously successful in imprisoning her within the narrow limits of her character and envinniment ; she never passes outside them, never for a moment approximates in type to the Englishmen with whom she is from time to time contrasted. Her speech uncannily reproduces the peculiarities of French idiom, and yet contrives to read like English ; it is a symbol of her relationship with the alien soldiers she tolerated, cared for, and grew rich upon. Mr. Mottram makes her also a symbol of the French attitude to the Peace ; but there is no need to connect her with that ; she can stand by herself.
Miss Jerrold has a gift for analysis, and for the connecting- links, the limbs and outward flourishes of fiction. These advantaces, together with a careful style, make Hangingstone
Farm readable, but they do not give it body. The characters are most real when not actually present. Their words add nothing to what Miss Jerrold tells us about them ; indeed, they often weaken the impression. There is sometimes a pomposity about their recorded contemplations :— "'A spirit of idolatry or a liking for symmetrical exactitude, which, I wonder, have we here ? ' Serie mused."
The most vivid character- is the runaway who remains, throughout the action of the book, in Austrilia.
L. P. HARTLEY.
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