Fiction
Childhoods East and West
The Legend Called Meryom. By Joseph Geer. (George Allen and Unwin. 78. 6d.)
110WEVER dubious be the benefits of psycho-analysis, that ruthless method of inquiry has at least startled the present generation into realizing the importance of childish impres- sions. It is an importance almost too eagerly welcomed by novelists who have forgotten, say, how delicately Thackeray dealt with the childhood of Esmond; and half the stories of to-day spend space and trouble over the early years of here and heroine. Childhoods vary, and some so recorded seem tedious enough to readers who secretly share the universal conviction that their own beginnings had something unique. I begin to weary of those middle-class Victorian childhoods. If the young people of to-day are rebels, they are the children of rebels, for the real break with Victorian tradition happened long before the War. The theme of opposition between the generations is being done to death. There is an eternal division between age and youth ; but parents and children to-day certainly move on one plane as they never did before in England.
The title of Blind Lead suggests a tragic metaphor to those who are happily unacquainted with cards ; but the story is no more dramatic than a game of bridge may be. The heroine, Lettice, gets her first poetic impressions of life and her first tenderness for her little friend Rudy, when " Papa " takes his family, in the 'nineties, to recover from measles in Wales. The descriptions of Welsh hills and rivers and fairy lore are sincerely felt, though the style is not memorable. Lettice, bereft of Rudy by her fair, selfish cousin, nevertheless achieves her frustrated honeymoon in her childish paradise with Basil, who secretly thinks it a little insensitive of het. She returns there a third time to think, where her up-to-date daughter, Christine, insists on marrying Rudy's poetic, but ineligible, son. Accidentally she meets Rudy himself, who gets drowned immediately, so that Basil has an awkward situation to rectify, and an opportunity to show that he is as valuable as Rudy: All the disputes and ironies of an average well-to-do family are faithfully described ; but the manner lacks edge and dis- tinction. Old Mrs. Whitworth at the end, musing over a lost charm of existence, really remains longest in the mind.
But Mrs. Whitworth would have been amazed at the atten. tion given to the mere art of behaviour in the education of a Japanese girl, as described in Yuki San by the Dutch novelist Ellen Forest. This might have been a most illuminating piece of writing if the author had been more impersonal. She should have allowed the small, dainty figures to make their genuflecting, impassive way through the blossoming trees to the bridge of marriage and the rock of suicide and the barque of exile without comment. Yuki San's friend, the Dutch girl, seems opaque beside her, and dulls the convex mirror of the tale. Yet we do realize the alien strength of that exquisite heartless code of life, and understand that a Japanese who breaks with tradition must go miserably, cut off from a fastidious dignity which it is hard to lose.
Make a farther flight. Streets of mud and green cupolas in Lipcova, a townlet lost in the flats of Bessarabia, and the little Jewess, Meryom, sitting lost in the legends of Azriel the cobbler I What she was made Meryom a legend also, not what befell her ; for her beauty and wisdom flowered and fell in her squalid and obscure birthplace, spent upon the ordinary ritual of marriage and child-rearing. Life began with mag- nificent promises and faded away in calm resignations. This slowly moving story, crowded with squalid and pathetic shapes, has much imaginative quality ; and a repressed
sweetness, such as dwelt in the heart of Motke, weaving the beloved face into the Mat --*hich would lie at last the sole memorial of the " Leg_end called Meryom."
Jamaica liow---jand a cynical father, not _without' honour, though he has be en a libertine, regards the small Study in Bronze for which a mad moment has made him responsible. He' does his best to provide the imaginative emotional child with an armour of fatalism ; and how Lucea, after experiencing delight and agony in London, solves the colour problem, so far as she is concerned, in a Manner that does credit to his stoicism, provides matter for an impassioned and sympathetic story. Lucea is a poet, and the creative impulse- saves her.
In The Last Chukka people do not appear -as children or childlike, though " childish " might -apply some of those amorous, shiftless, greedy creatures whose conversations are so banal that we think surely Mr. Waugh cares as little for them as we do. Most of the London stories are indeed sur- prisingly ill-written; but those coloured with 'the East have more force of situation and more sincere feeling. "The Slippery Ladder," an amusing piece of social satire, is the best of the first set ; "The Decent Thing," the most penetrating of the second. The name story, has a real touch of jungle- horror, but suffers from a divided interest.
- RACDF.r. ANNAND TAYLOR.
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