FICTION.
THE NARROW HOUSE.*
MISS EVELYN Scow is clearly by nature an able, observant psychologist, by choice apparently a reader and admirer of Miss Dorothy Richardson and perhaps of the Sitwells. In The Narrow House she makes a remarkable analysis of four or five characters and their reactions upon one another. She -seems particularly to desire that the reader should understand one of her points, for she exemplifies it in both the married couples whom she portrays. It is the power of a slightly selfish, empty, quite affectionate and well-meaning, and mentally and physically weak woman to dominate the men with whom she comes in contact, and her husband in particular.
There is no question that Miss Scott has got a perfectly clear and definite image of her characters and their surroundings upon her mind, and her use of minute exterior things is good— the warm carpet • in the hall, rain, a child playing or in team, the unskilfulness in the matter of dress of one of her women. The small. disagreeables of being ill in a small, rather squalidly run house, the minor discomfort of the alternate attraction and
The Narrow House. By Evelyn Scott. London : Duckworth. [7a. M. net.]
repulsion of the husband towards his unreasonable, sick, clinging, but amiable wife are also very well described and used. But the success of the method through which she has chosen to convey all this, an analytical, illusive style with a minute insistence on details that are not consciously noticed by the average person, is by no means uniform. We feel that the style is borrowed and, like borrowed clothes, does not always fit. Here is an example where Miss Evelyn Scott has used. the method successfully :-
" Late afternoon. There was no sun. Below the blank grey sky, the long blank street. Along the street a pair of sleek and ponderous black- horses, with thick manes and shaggy fetlocks, plodded before a loaded dray. Their bodies rocked and swayed tensely with strain. Their huge feet clattered and strove against the asphalt. The hands of the driver, red, with full, knotted veins, hung loose between his knees, holding the slack reins. His body, in a khaki shirt, was hunched forward miserably. From his fat, stupid face his eyes glanced dully under a bare thatch of neutral-tinted hair. Only the horses, purposeful and immense in their obedience, seemed to understand."
But the latter part of the following is surely slightly ridiculous— a self parody of Miss Scott's method. The reader must under- stand first of all that the minor feminine intrigues of the sick wife who is always reproaching her husband, because she says he does not love her enough, have the effect of making
well-meaning Laurence feel cruel and hard and ashamed of his strength. He is Gulliver, driven to a state almost of desperation by his wife's Lilliputian arrows. He has left her in bed :— " You do love me ? ' She clung to his arm. ' Of course.' Then kiss me again.' He kissed her. Her terrible, hunger hurt and confused him. He would rather not have seen her thin throat' that suggested a young swan's, her pointed chin, her eyes, and the- reddish hair which had slipped 'in confusion about her shoulders. . . . The houses with lowered blinds were secret and filled with women. Girls going to work came out of the houses like the words of women. Women going to market passed slowly before him with their baskets. Pregnant women walked before him in confidence. The uncoloured atmosphere threw back, the sky. It was the mirror of women. Laurence felt crowded between the bodies of women and houses. He walkedquickly, with his head bent. On the concrete pavements, washed white, as bones by the storm of the night before, were rust-coloured: puddles.. Dark and still, they quivered now and again, like quiet minds touched by the horror of a recollection. The reflections of the houses lay deep in them, shattered, like dead things."
Paragraphs like the last we would beg Miss Scott to reconsider. There is something wrong. At a venture one would say that the style—we will call it Miss Dorothy Riohardson's, because she is the most prominent exploiter of it—does not quite suit Miss Scott because she has not got quite the necessary abnormal sense perceptions.
- To Miss Edith Sitwell, who employs modifications of this half symbolic method, but in verse, sunshine really does tinkle on the wall, a blade of grass can be " shrill," but we feel that Miss Scott has been too busy observing her characters- to be quite sure whether it is '.•` shrill " or " tinkling " sunshine should be, and so has put in her strange adjectives, not.because she her- self felt them to be exactly appropriate, but because she hoped by this means to convey something to her reader that she has great difficulty in explaining. In so far as her eccentricities are the result of a search for beauty of expression she is, of course, perfectly right to feel about, for thoughts of any subtlety can probably only be expressed by means of beauty. The diffi- culty is that the particular form of beauty after which she has striven has so often eluded her. If she can settle her stylistic difficulties satisfactorily, Miss Scott might well write a very • admirable book. She has already, in The Narrow House, written one which is thoroughly interesting and which displays much delicacy of conception.
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