Mary Webb
The Essential Mary Webb. Selected with an Introduction by Martin Armstrong. (Cape. 12s. 6d.)
WITH the advent - of Mr. Armstrong's anthology it .is time to realise that Mary Webb has a small but honourable place in English literature. The fact that her least popular novel has had thirteen impressions while her most popular work has run to sixty-six, has perhaps invited the disfavour of those critics who believe that "best-sellers" can hardly be taken seriously. It is usual to suggest that Mary Webb is content with a sentimental acceptance of nature. If that were true, her work would be extremely hackneyed and totally unlike her writing as we know it. Although her characters tend to be types rather than individuals, her treatment of nature is skilled and powerful. In his discriminating introduc- tion •to this book, Mr. Armstrong reminds us of "that sense of something behind Outward appearances . . . the light in which, in all her work, she presents the natural scene." He then opens the anthology with the poem "Presences," which contains in little, the spirit of her work. It is a forcible reminder of Wordsworth, an open acknowledgement of the pantheism, at once intelligent and sensuous which raises Mary Webb above the common level. Mary Webb is a poet, and one is not surprised to find her sensuous as a novelist. She never took to smoking because she was afraid of losing her sense of smell, and losing her delight even in flowers which are scentless to the ordinary person. In The Spring of 70y she wrote: "Nature spreads her sweets for the poor: she gives them rosemary instead of sandal-buds, wild cassia instead of cinna- mon, iris roots and ploughman's spikenard for those who cannot buy attar of roses. The nectar of full hives, warm wax, dry leaves, ripening apples—these are her commonplaces. The very beetle climbing a rough willow is redofent of flowers." And yet—as Mr. Armstrong rightly stresses—she does not merely gush her apprecia- tion. She uses her mind as well as her emotions.
Mary Webb, like one of the greater novelists, would never describe a cabbage by moonlight unless she had been to the kitchen-garden at night and observed the cabbage. She watched the wood-sorrel at intervals before the rain, and noted the various hexagonal forms in nature. She saw each clover-plant not only . as an individual organism, but also as a member, even a half-conscious member, of some vast supernatural design. That ever-present sense of the more-than-human lies in the symbolism of the Devil's Chair in The Golden An-ow, and even in human beings : the hunt in Gone to Earth. It is, though not on a level of genius, the development of the deus ex machina in Greek and Racinian tragedy ; Venus has again, irrevocably, found her prey. It seems at first like a pagan idea of malicious destiny ; and the characters of Mary Webb are often pagan, in the blind, unthinking way in which they allow their animal passions to transcend conventions. Yet no one who has read Armour Wherein He Trusted can doubt her profound Christianity.
The almost pagan pantheism, the sincere Christianity, and, of course, the exquisite observation of nature, give Mary Webb her claim to distinction. What endears her most to us, perhaps, is her
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