FICTION
By FORREST REID (Golden Cockerel Press. 8s. 6d.)
RALPH Fox was killed fighting in the International Column before Madrid. He had already published three or four Books —among them a novel—and he left behind him the manu- script of a second novel, This Was Their Youth, the story of a Northern industrial town. I am only guessing, but I think possibly it contains memories of his own boyhood ; at least that was the impression I received while reading it—partly because of the period—about 191 i—and partly because the school and the schoolboys occupy so prominent a position in the picture. I call it a picture deliberately, for the primary aim of the book, almost as much as in Cranford, or Q's Troy Town, is to give the portrait of a place. Therefore there is no distinction between major and minor characters. Certain persons are chosen—Sergeant Smitham, the gloomy policeman, Sergeant Whittam, the amiable drill instructor at Queen Elizabeth's School, two or three teachers male and female, Alan Brown the War Correspondent, Canon Webster—but they are chosen because the adult activities of the town can best be presented through them, while the rest is left to the Reefer and his pals, day-boys at Queen Elizabeth's School, and to Mat, a boy of lower class, with whom they are not supposed to associate.. It is this juvenile life which is most vividly and successfully recaptured. The boys are average, adventurous; fairly tough boys, each with his own private ambition, his secret dream of glory—except Henry, perhaps, whose "dreams were not those that fix one gloriously, to the post of duty. When Hent'y dreaMed he made material for textbooks on psycho-analysis, and in this respect, as in many others, he was before his time." It speaks highly for the author's creative power that the book though fragmentary and devoid of plot is fascinating. The town is there before us—not the whole town, to be sure, for the life of mill-workers and factory-workers exists only as a kind of dark and sinister hut:tuning in the background—but the Reefer's town, the town which, if my surmise be correct, Ralph Fox himself knew. It is a rather sad-toned picture, leaving a memory of damp and mist and autumn, of dead branches and bonfires, of snow and winter, not. of spring• or summer or sunlight. And,- mingled with this, one has an impression of life going on in an endless and mysterious activity, much as when, on turning over a flat stone, one suddenly uncovers a colony of ants. Perhaps there is a purpose behind it ; perhaps not : one replaces the stone, one closes the book. But the vision remains of that restless striving eagerness to fulfil some unknown destiny, which may be, after all, nothing but the blind struggle of the life-force. Naturally it is much easier to achieve an effect of pure realism in a bOOk of this sort than when, as in Miss Bridge's study of Italian provincial life, there is a dramatic plot to be developed. Yet I think Enchanter's Nightshade puts an unneces- sary strain 'Upon credulity. I do not deny that a charming young girl like. Elena di Castellon might possess a gift for forgery. Only, brought up sn carefully as Elena was, living the kind of life she did, under the sympathetic supervision of the wise and admirable Fraulein -Gelsicher ; in short, considering the class to which she belonged, it seems to me highly improbable that she ever would have discovered it. The very fact that it is so useful in providing Miss Bridge with a big scene makes its arbitrariness the more conspicuous. It is the kind of inven- tion one might pass in a novel of ingenuity, a Wilkie Collins novel, but not here. I-knew, moreover, when in the first chapter Elena takes her governess in with a forged letter, that this singular aptitude of hers was destined to play an important part in the plot. It does ; it changes its whole course ; but at the same time it weakens the illusion of reality. A further weakness is Miss Bridge's tendency to interrupt her story when it suggests a topic upon which she wishes to express her views. Yet one can forgive her much for. the sake of her characters. These are all Italians, with the exception of Friiulein Gelsicher, and Almina Prestwich, the young English
governess of Elena's cousin Marietta. Two of the portraits are even beautifhl-r-that of Marietta, and that of Giulio, Elena's brother, the ardent young disciple of Croce. Of Almina, who is at the centre of the drama, I feel less certain. She is very young, fresh from Oxford, yet even so of an innocence that seems to me hardly credible. Miss Bridge thinks that in 1907 a good many girls of Almina's class accepted the vegetable origin of babies. But in- .1907 Miss Bridge probably was in the nursery : I was not, and know that they did nothing of the sort. So Almina is disillusioned somewhat brutally ; and if the story has not a tragic ending, neither has it a very happy one. I have mentioned what strike me as flaws in an otherwise enjoyable book. Miss Bridge is an intelligent and charming writer.
" There is no love in nature ; women have invented it,"
says Pierre Costa, the hero of M. Montherlant's Pity for Women; but it is a cry of exasperation. Here are others : " The heart infects .everything. On the plane of friendship or on the plane of sensuality, things are healthy." " There is no help for it. I' have used up my feelings. I gave all in a first love at the age of sixteen." -The- entire book, in fact, is an analysis of love—love voracious, love rejected, love repressed, love satiated—but always love devoid of loyalty or affection. In the end one seems to be reading about a disease—a fever of the body and a sickness of the soul. CoSta is a writer : he pursues women, is pursued by them ; and that, at the age of 35, appears to be the whole of his life. Actually, of course, no sane person could live on this plane of continuous emotional irritation and desire. But the plan of the novel excludes all else. So far as the everyday world is concerned, Costa is presented without contacts, his life seems to be lived in a kind of vacuum, or on a desert island, though the island is Paris. Completely egotistic, he ponders, while he is making love, on how he will subsequently get rid of the belovel, when she shall have ceased to be desirable. These visions lead him as far as the contemplation of murder. True, he knows that he will never really push Solange off the deck of a steamboat, but to have had the thought is an indication of the value of his attachment, and also-of the quality- of hii-inind. He-is- it strange being, highly strung, impulsive, subtle, without illusions, or what he would call illusions—faith, hope, and charity. He is intelligent-up to a point—the point at which the understanding of ' simplicity begins. As a treatise on erotic psychology the novel certainly is illuminating, but hardly as a picture of normal life. Of course Costa is intended to be exceptional, but he is also definitely unpleasant, and so are the neurotic girls who pour out their souls to him in letters. They are uncontrolled, their' ultimate fate seems to be -either suicide or a mental home. 'Yet the novel is the work of an original,. and penetrating mind.
Mr. Alec Brown is far from original. Misled by its title, Breakfast in -Bed, and- by the comic little drawings on the wrapper, I imagined his book to be a humorous work : but it is merely Red propaganda interlarded with the usual adulteries
conseientious, and dull.
-Ile Fugitive is mare 'impressive, and the title is apt; for it is -the' story of .a man hunt. A: boy of 18, a young American farm -land, in a. moment of passion kills the brutal master who has cheated him. He seeks refuge among the mountains and woods, where for three days he remains in hiding. The novel has a lyrical form : it is simply the expression of this boy's agony of mind—his hopes, fears, despairs, visions of the past, and final acceptance of death as he listens, now half- unconsciously, to the distant baying of the bloodhounds. Mr. Meredith writes with power, and a profound human sympathy through which at times he achieves beauty. His young hero may be a murderer, but there is nothing evil in him, and a great deal that is good. The tragedy is an accident of fate, such as might happen to anybody : a moment of blind passion is followed by a -punishment that is useless, that simply destroys a second, and in this case infinitely more valuable life.
Mr. Chambers and Persephone h a short story, a modern variation- on the old legend, decorated with wood engravings, and told with a grave and sophisticated simplicity that is nut unpleasing.
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