FICTION.
AN ELUSIVE ALLEGORY.
Lady into Fox was a romantic episode treated realistically, and when people shook their heads over it they were, con- sciously or not, finding fault with its realism, not with its romance. Conceived like a fairy tale, in execution it had the precision and scrupulous verisimilitude of a statement made upon oath. It appealed to the imagination and then set out to convince the intelligence. It was as though the dog-rose had bloomed and produced, for the author and for us, not a flower but a botanical specimen, rosa canna, a blossom that savoured, as his skilful dissection ,convinced us, as much of the dog as of the rose. A Man in the Zoo shows Mr. Garnett- with some of his old preoccupations, but humanized. It is true that John Cromartie, crossed in love, beguiled his leisure as a voluntary exhibit at the Zoo by making friends with one of the smaller cats ; but they were united merely by bonds of affection, not by the rites of the Church, and the alliance could be terminated by each at will. One can easily feel of the caracal (as one could never feel of Mrs. Tebrick) that it is an allegorical figure; a relaxation. a consolation, medicinal to a sick soul because its manifesta- tions were unself-conscious, requiring only a direct reaction, not a considered reply. It was vain to look for a parable in Mr. Garnett's earlier book. That was simply a work of art, and its implications, its under- and over-tones, were directed to the maintenance of its aesthetic poise. Here they have a different intention, they refer to an underlying conception of life that gives a secret significance to the incidents of Mr. Cromartie's strange retreat. Mr. Garnett is shy of revealing—perhaps could not wholly reveal—the figure in his carpet ; but its presence, if not its outline, is discernible in the dialogue. Even when most heated and impatient with each other, the characters have the air of addressing themselves to a third party, of speaking rather on their own behalf than by themselves. Their strong and persistent desire for self-justification would, it is true, partly account for this, but not for the sensation one has that most of their utterances are susceptible of allegorical interpretations. As a result, the relations between the characters are a little blunted, and the situation, intriguing as it is, loses something of its raw, immediate appeal through being the symbol of a general truth. But the gain in depth is tremendous. Mr. Garnett has relinquished the archaisms of his style but preserved its lucidity and simplicity. It is not a style to be hurried, it keeps a very even pace ; and in moments of violent physical action, when, for example, Mr. Cromartie is mauled by his neighbour the monkey, its deliberation becomes a separate quality, akin to the slow motion of the cinema. But it is an admirable style, fitting thought closely, without crease or wrinkle, and its economy is never more clearly seen than when Mr. Garnett is describing physical
pain. He feels it, and makes us feel it, like an animal, a fierce reality unmitigated by and unrelated to any other experience. Whatever the solution of his parable may be, we are sure that pain plays a great part in it.
Some Do Not is a bewildering book. To the difficulties of
the impressionist method Mr. Ford Madox Ford has added almost every possible stumbling-block known to the novelist, and they are all, we feel resentfully, deliberate ; for surely no writer was ever more self-conscious. Even his imitations of Conrad, if now habitual, must once have been intentional.
A quotation will show the demands he makes upon his readers' sense of chronology :-
"That had been five—or at most six—Fridays before Valentine at with Mark Tietjens in the War Office waiting hall, and, on the Friday immediately before that again, all the guests being gone, Edith Ethel had come to the tea-table and, with her velvet kindness, had placed har sight-hand on Valentine's left. Admiring the gesture with a deep fervour, Valentine knew that was the end. Three days before, on the Monday, Valentine. . . ."
Like the crab, he generally goes backwards and like the cuttle-fish emits a dark cloud—a cloud of allusions, innuendoes and cross-references, dots, incomplete sentences. We may say at once that this paraphernalia of obscurity is not fallacious : it corresponds to a complexity of plot, incident
and character which fascinates while it baffles. Yet such is the confusion that it took some time to realize that the
hero's loss of memory, suggested at first by the bare narration of his thwarted thoughts, was anything more serious than an intensification of his normal mental habit. Tietjens is a Yorkshire gentleman of good family—how often the author
insists upon that I—a Civil Servant, a mathematical genius,
a war-hater, a Francophil, a man of scrupulous private life married to a woman who has:some claim to be considered the most odious character in modem fiction. It is a triumph of Mr. Ford's method to have made his portrayal of Tietjens moving and organic , our view of him has to be continually modified and the final page scarcely reveals him. Even Sylvia, his wife, has a surprise in store for us, a surprise that should make us judge her less harshly ; but it does not, for her discovery that she loves her husband comes too late, except to cause him inconvenience, since he had decided to delegate his affections to the woman whom the world, and most of all his wife, had long considered his mistress. It is characteristic of the book that almost every character in turn accuses the others, angrily and openly, of having illegitimate children, and the accused, reasonably and humbly, always reply in the negative. We find it hard to believe that the War and the years before the War produced the colours and patterns Mr. Ford's kaleidoscope gives them ; that they were as wicked or as witty or as wrong-headed. But we are sorry when the pageant comes to an end.
L. P. HARTLEY.
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