3 SEPTEMBER 1937, Page 28

FICTION

By F()RREST REID 7s. 6d.) She Painted Her Face. By Dornford Yates. (Ward, Lock. 7s. 6d.)

THE essential difference between romanticism and realism in fiction is easier to feel than to define. It is less a matter of detail than of atmosphere. The method of Pickwick, for instance, might seem to promise realism, yet Pickwick strikes us as a romance. There is behind it a guiding purpose and intelligence kinder than life, the author shows partiality, distinguishes between the just and the unjust, bestows rewards and punishments, cannot bear to leave Mr. Jingle unrepentant, Mr. Stiggins unchastised, Mr. Pickwick to a lonely old age.

Sir Hugh Walpole does not set things in order quite after this fashion, nevertheless John Cornelius is a novel in the Dickens tradition. I do not for a moment suppose that it is deliberately romantic. Very likely it is as realistic' in intention as Miss Wallace's The Faithful Compass. Yet temperament influences intention, manifests itself in a touch here, a touch there, as instinctive as the act of lifting a drowning fly out of a pool. Nor are these necessarily false touches. Drowning flies often are lifted out of pools—when there is any- body there to lift them. But more frequently there is nobody there, or the spectator is indifferent, and a novelist like Miss Wallace accepts the fact. I do not mean that, after the manner of Hardy, she goes to the opposite extreme ; only I think that, had she written the life of John Cornelius, John would have been much more lonely and unhappy than in Sir Hugh's book he is allowed to be. An affection so constant and unselfish as Charlie's would not have been there to console him, because in actual life that kind of love is infinitely rare. In fact, the most desolating impression we receive from Miss Wallace's book is just of the appalling selfishness of love, of the misery it can inflict in its own ruthless pursuit of happiness. John, however, is supported not only by the staunch and simple-hearted Charlie, but also by the devotion of Anne, equally generous and understanding. These gifts are his for life ; his rash and impulsive marriage cannot change them ; it arouses misgiving, but not jealousy or alienation.

The novel takes the shape of a biography, and the character and history of John, we are told, were suggested by the character and history of Hans Andersen. It is a form which possesses both advantages and disadvantages. We get a vividly objective view of John, but the author, writing in the first person, can never go behind hini, can only give his impression, supplemented by Charlie's and Anne's impressions, and by what he has been told by John himself... The first part of the book, dealing with childhood and boyhood, seenied to me the most attractive. John is a peculiar boy, vain, ugly, grotesque, affectionate, with a kind of dog-like faith in anybody who shows him kindness. He is first drawn to the theatre, then determines to be a novelist,- but his failure is absolute. He marries early, and, as might have been predicted, foolishly. His wife is young, beautiful, and wealthy ; she likes John and thinks he is going to do her credit, but her belief in him is not strong enough to survive his failure ; moreover she resents his intimacy with Anne and Charlie ; she decides that her swan is after all a goose. Then come the fairy stories and a success which revives her waning affection, but bridgs John himself little pleasure.

It is perhaps a tragic story, in so far as the hero from the beginning is a misfit in any other world than that of his imagina- tion. Actually there is a good deal of happiness in John's life. The whole thing is most agreeably done ; in fact one hardly knows why it fails to be completely convincing. It maybe something in the biographical method, which produces more a sense of listening to a legend than- of being face to face with life. And there is the minor difficulty of the fairy storks; of their overwhelming success. A volume of fairy _talcs,. One feels—even as good as Hans Andersen's—is distinctly not the kind of book to sweep all before it in the modern literary

world. -

One has no difficulty, unfortunately, in believing in Miss Wallace's novel, though it would be more comforting not to do so. It is a remarkable and at times a brilliant book, much narrower in scope than John Cornelius, simply a love story, with the scene laid in the Cumberland Lake District. The author takes no sides with her characters ; indeed, she presents them with so much detachment that not till we are half-way through the story do we realise that Marianne cannot be what Roddy thinks her, what we ourselves had hitherto thought her. Then, in a sudden flash, her shallowness and selfishness are revealed. Yet the lapse is brief, on the surface she remains a lovely and charming girl, and so, one divines, she will always appear to the vast majority of her acquaintance. Even to Roddy she is just sufficiently sympathetic to bewilder him, to keep him chained to an illusion. Only we now know that she will " bitch " him when the occasion arrives. There are two themes in the novel ; both love themes. There is the wasted fidelity of Roddy (grim enough are the scenes in which he sits with his brutal father trying to drown his unhappiness in drink), and there is the love affair of Marianne which she pursues with a clear-sighted tenacity of purpose that is successful in so far as it secures her an indifferent husband who has grown bored with a promiscuous life. Roddy can now be definitely shelved, so she invites him to the party at which her engagement is announced. " Vanity of vanities ; all is vanity " : that, I think, would have been a more suitable motto for the book than the one Miss Wallace has chosen, unless for Marianne, too, we are to accept the symbol of the faithful compass.

A Matador Dies is a translation of Sanee- t Ltanieres, which gained the Prix Goncourt in 1935. It is a story of the complete and abject subjection Of a man to a woman, who not only bleedi him dry; but humiliates and. tortures him.-- The subject has been treated before—squeezed out, indeed, to the very last drop—by both Pierre- Loiiys and Octave ,Mirbeau. Here the soullessness and cruelty of the human drama is accentuated b3 the background of the Spanish bull-ring. Our remaining tales are noveli of adventure, and One wonders why Mr. Graham, who had excellent material at his disposal, should have handicapped himself with so unprepossessing. a hero as Tom Anderson, whose single virtue is the brute courage of the gangster. In New Orleans Tom helps in the lynching of an innocent negro boy ; in Trinidad he gains• the love of al native woman and abandons her. Gold-mining in Africa pis succeeded by pioneering, an attempt to run a farm in the veldt. But this is the last adventure ; a storm wrecks Tom's house and he is buried in the ruins. Tragedy it is not, for though we are interested in the shifting scenes and rough life Mr. Graham describes so vividly, the ultimate fate of Tom leaves us indifferent.

With Nocturne in Sunlight we return definitely to romance. The scene is Mexico and the time the eighteen-sixties, when for a brief period Maximilian, with the backing of Napoleon was Emperor. To Mexico comes Julian Braie, a young painter, who for no other reason than because he is naturally chivalrous, throws in his lot with that of the doomed Maximilian and his wife. It is from the beginning a hopeless cause, but Julian remains faithful to the end, only seeking safety in flight after the Emperor has been captured and condemned to death. Of course a love story is woven into the general action, but it • is of minor importance, being seen always against a back- ground of larger interests, the fulfilment of a tragic destiny nothing can avert. The novel is picturesque and well written, its tone attractive because the chief characters are people who possess moral standards and a sense of honour. The very sobriety of its manner seems to me infinitely more enticing than the mechanical liVeliness of such a tale as She Painted Her Face. This is a sort of Ruritanian thriller, with secret passages, a heroine in distress, a wicked uncle, and two dashing young men of the Bulldog Drummond type. Mr. Yates prints his more impressive sentences in italics—a technique I do not remember to have encountered before. But the whole thing is a tissue of improbabilities.