FICTION
By FORREST REID Meat for Mammon. By Mary Mitchell. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) Chosen People. By Seaforth Mackenzie. (Cape. 7s. 6d.) The Larger View. By Benjamin Kaverin. Translated by E. Leda Swan. (Cassell. 8s. 6d.)
Miss MITCHELL'S Meat for Mammon is, no doubt, "one of the tales which have been told a hundred times." It is none
the less interesting for that, and none the less fresh, since the freshness is in the manner, the characters, the point of view. I should think nobody who begins the novel is likely to leave it unfinished, or even to skip a passage. The style is light, witty, concise ; the subject not of a kind that can grow old-fashioned so long as human nature remains what it is ; and the philosophy is sound. For Miss Mitchell, in her own way, is a philosopher, and all the more persuasive because she is never consciously didactic. She has her code, her standard of values, but these are expressed through her Characters, and largely through their suffering or happiness. This may be to give a misleading impression of her work, which is as free from a missionary element as Jane Austen's. The tale is the thing, but the tale is never permitted to stray from reality, its development is strictly logical, and, if it pleases,
ft is not because rewards or punishments are arbitrarily dealt out, or because in the end " Jack hath Jill." In a sense the characters reap what they sow, but not always what they are worth. Sara, long before we leave her, we know can never be happy, yet she is worth much ; while • it is doubtful if Len can be more than moderately happy, though she is
the kindest and most unselfish person in the book. On the other hand, the smug Philip is happy, having obtained every- thing he desired. Sophocles, for this very reason, would have made him wretched, but Sophocles, when he connected misery with the gratification of desire, was thinking of Oedipus, not of a self-complacent business-man, hard, unimaginative, and ungenerous. Further, the moral of the whole thing seems to be that falling in love is a blind guide so far as successful marriage is concerned.
. The two girls, Luce and Sara, daughters of Sir Henry Dawslip, a brilliant surgeon, both love blindly, and marry in haste against the advice of their parents. Yet the parents are right, for when passion wanes it does not in either case leave friendship or esteem behind it. Sara discovers the essential meanness of Philip, his contempt for all that does
not lead to money-making. Luce discovers that she is tied to a man devoid of ambition ; kind, it is true, but so soft that anybody can impose upon him. Would Sara have been happy with Len, Luce with Philip ? Even that is hard to say. For after all, to be an idealist like Sara is easy when
one has ten thousand a year, and to become a shrew like Luce is perhaps easier still when the children need boots and their father refuses to press his clients for fees due to him. It is here that Miss Mitchell is so good—in the expression of counter-claims, the difficulties and complexities which quite ordinary situations may create. Sara's chief tragedy is that she watches her boy growing more and more like Philip, driving hard bargains, taking advantage of his school-mates, judging all things from a mercenary standpoint. Luce's trouble is that her boys are too much the other way. When Sir Henry dies, and there is some money to educate them, her hopes revive, but they are speedily disappointed. " Though Tommy was exceedingly glad to get the chance of doing law, it was, it appeared, with the sole ambition of coming into Dad's office, while Roger, though amenable to studying medicine, plumped for a branch which filled his mother with disgust and despair : he, it turned out, had long nursed the hope of becoming a vet."
So there it is. Roger's desire springs from his love of animals, Tommy's from his love of Dad. Our sympathies are com- pletely with them, yet we can see Luce's point of view as well.
How different it is from her husband's appears even at the close of -their honeymoon, when they find themselves in a railway-carriage with two sticky little boys, who make friendly overtures which she repulses. But Len takes one of them on his knee, and the thought occurs to her : Supposing she were to produce a pair of brats like that ! And then, more despondently : " Even if she did, Len would probably blte them. She had never come across anyone so hopelessly indiscriminate "
Of course we prefer Len, but the incompatibility of tem- perament remains, and when the first erotic ecstasies are over, it is all that does remain. Miss Mitchell brings this out-well,: where she might have been more subtle, I think, is in the draw- ing of Philip. One can • imagine with what delicate, hardly perceptible gradations an artist like Henry James would have revealed Philip's true nature. Miss Mitchell does so to abruptly : Philip is all right at one moment, all wrong at the next. One remembers the portrait of Rosy Muniment in The Princess Casamassima—the most wonderful example I can recall of the gradual revelation of a character. The fact that Professor Beach in his excellent book on James finds Rosy charming does not alter my opinion. Rosy is very far from being charming, and Henry James knew it, and in a single remark—" I don't like her "—made by one of the chiracters near the end of the tale, confirms all the doubts and suspicions that have been accumulating in the reader's mind from the beginning. This, I feel, is how a character ought to be drawn, because it is thus—and particularly I should think after mar- riage—that people reveal themselves in life. Miss Mitchell's obvious defence would be that she was writing of a person much less deep than Rosy, and that her method has the advan- tage of making misconception impossible. At all events, she has written a good novel, and her humour is delightful.
Mr. Seaforth Mackenzie's Chosen People is, too, a study of character. I liked it less than his first book, The Young Desire It, though it has, I admit, the fasrinarion of strangeness. The atmosphere, indeed, is decidedly menacing, and below the surface of commonplace respectability we are aware of forbidden passions that may break through at any moment. In the fore- ground Mr. Mackenzie places a pair of young lovers, Richard and Marjorie, who are normal : but that is a device; they really are subsidiary figures ; the Elisons, a family of Jews with whom they become entangled, form the genuine subject of the book. And the Elisons are peculiar ; in life one .would avoid them. The father, ageless and placid, remains merely a slightly sinister onlooker, and the daughter, Deborah, is only sixteen. But the mother, Ruth, is an unscrupulous degenerate, dominating her daughter, and deriving a perverse pleasure from the idea of marrying her to her own lover. I confess. that Ruth is too complex for me ; I have to take her on the author's word. The scene is Sydney, and the time today, but, while I read, the hands of the clock seemed to be gliding back, until I found myself in the equivocal and half-forgotten world of Barbey d'Aurevilly. How that guileless old romantic would have loved writing this tale, introducing a touch of Catholicism so that it might have the additional piquancy of blasphemy, and thereby endanger • his own salvation. Mr. Mackenzie is not a disciple of Barbey : he is a realist, and much more convincing ; nevertheless, I think he might like Les Diaboliques. •
In a Russian novel one expects the characters to be a little odd, and that there will be plenty of psychology. The oddness, I imagine, consists chiefly in the fact that emotions are displayed in all their primitive nakedness ; nobody quite grows up ; the child remains visible in the man. It is remarkable, in this respect, how little difference there is between Kaverin's picture of contemporary Russian life, and the life described by Sologub or Dostoievsky. The Larger View is not a masterpiece, but it was distinctly worth translating. The people are chiefly pro- fessors and students ; politics lurk in the background ; but the plot turns on the theft of some valuable manuscripts, and one of the young heroes, Trubachevsky, is immediately suspected. There is no decisive proof against him, but there is the fact that he had the opportunity, and his old master, from whom the treasures have been stolen, is almost alone in believing in his innocence. It is a long story, with many characters, and that strange, dream-like persuasiveness which distinguishes Russian fiction. The Russians are the most realistic of all writers, because into no other realism is the element of fantasy so closely woven. I liked The Larger View. The students are students— young, impulsive, boyish. And this sympathy with youth) this gift for creating it, is another characteristic of the Russian
genius. -
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