Reflections
A Gallery of Mirrors, by Richard Heron Ward (Gollancz, 16s.), is a rare book. Mr. Ward has drawn a series of portraits, in part no doubt touched up with the pencil of his imagin- ation, of people who touched him closely in his childhood and youth; and, reflected in the mirror-surface of these carefully observed studies, we catch the faithful likeness of the painter himself. Mr. Ward has an objective understanding of people of many kinds; a country children's maid, a devoted doctor, a ne'er-do-well cousin, a suburban intellectual, a hearty school chaplain are all to him real people, living in their own right lives that only abut on his own in so far as there has been an interchange of understanding between him and them. By feeling out for their responses to simple ideas, to God, to nature, to sex and to society, Mr. Ward succeeds in seeing their lives as a whole, in intuitively comprehending those parts of their experience which were never shared with him, even in tracing their fortunes through years when be was not in touch with them at all.
The whole book is a monument to a par- ticular form of awareness. Mr. Ward would seem always to have stood back and seen his friends with an objective affection. Sometimes, when they touch him too deeply, as did the girl Helen, his first love, the impression be- comes blurred, and at other times, as with the mysterious gentleman, met at a Paris café, who had knowledge of the future, the portrait in its very mystery is perforce a little larger than life. But Mr. Ward's sense of awe is not re- served only for his mysterious acquaintances.
Even for a somewhat over-brazen hussy of an
actress, or for an Italian girl in Paris who reacts somewhat histrionically to a disappoint- ment in love, he retains a kind of wondering respect. Hobson, his 'Hero of Nowadays,' a lost intellectual who follows all the movements of his time and dies in desperation of finding the truth, is shown at a most appealing moment when some glimmering appears to be on the point of breaking through; and, as for the author, Mr. Ward reflects glimpses of himself at many moments when the mysteries of the world seem to offer sudden clues to a deeper reality. His book, which is excellent in the actual writing, would be worth reading for the record of those moments alone.
J. M. COHEN
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