Fiction

By V. S. PRITCHETT

Lost Shepherd. By Roland Luehington. (Cobden-Sanderson.

7s. 6d.) --

A coon title—I do not mean one which attracts the public but one which really describes the book—is rare: -It is a boon to the reviewer who tries to get down through an author's--words to the skin of his sensibility and intention. Landscape With Figures is such a title. It-perfectly describes Mr. Guinness's slight, faintly stylized English water (Amp'— a well-cultivated landscape with manor house and farm, all very green, sedate, gay and agreeable ; and against it young figures wishing to be seriously in love and behaving comically hike foals. The book is warmly written, heating-the veins but never blurting into anything so ugly and continental as passion7-though easily dropping into the equally English Chaucerian lechery and merriness. In -these passages Mr. Guinness is as fanciful as Mr. Powys, but without the latter's perpetual sexual itch. Mr. Guinness is, above all, grave in his lyricism,' unmuddled in his Sentiment,'" ironical but not Spinelessly and' heartlessly so. It 'is very' hard to captain the ruling quality of " niceness " in English character but Mr. Guinness has succeeded with this and with our

stolidity as well. ' •

His book, though it has a kind of story, is chiefly a collection of fragments and static characters. Two painters—the least real of all the people—take a cottage. They are looked upon as fair game for cheating by the local farmer=a „man of brief but sinister appearances, an excellent nasty character. Women arrive : the farmer's wife, a mild cow-like creature, weak with love at the sight of the yoting men ; and her muddled, frightened sister, Mrs. Tugwell. Then there is the delicious prig Gabriel, in the thick of a religious phase after leaving her convent,"gazing stuk-of windows:for a sight of the young man whom the Lord may have chosen for her. Foi He must have chosen one young man. The question is who? How hard it is to know 1 There arc also the constant Sarah and the wild Susan. They all wish to be in love, they all come to the point—and then the warm, serious English niceness intervenes. They are grateful that they do not have to love. Excepting the bewildered and absent- niinded wife of the farmer and the immortal Mrs. Tugwell- it is a conceit of Mr. Guinness's to call her Mrs. Tugwell, even after she has, rather incongruously, married one ofthe painters -excepting this mild and erring rustic couple, the rest are people who would all sooner be figures in a landscape. " Inigo

was walking with Sarah. Susan was following behind him with Henry. Inigo was apprehensive. He longed to look round and assure himself that his wife was not being taken away from him, but his pride would not allow him to tan his head. But he was:pleased to be with Sarah. Her calmness reassured him. Her constancy was like a statue of enduring stone. He wondered whether he would not have found more happiness in her gentle loveliness than in Susants wild- beauty. He was surprised to find that his joy

at possessing Susan was not_more intense and more secure. He *as, disappointed, too, that his honeymoon was over,

and that life went on much as before. And he found the return of the spring ill-timed and redundant to the pattern Of his And in and out of this equable ineOnelnsiveness runs the comic, delightful and canons small • boy Timothy, in the first terms of brutalization at his nice' public school. These are the best school scenes I have read in any novel

for years. Mr. :GuinnesS's Understatement is very pleasant.

The English niceness in its weakness for never facing things • is the subject of Mr. Lushington's affectionate,olever, penetrating and malicious study of an Edwardian vicar and his family. This side of the English character is particularly easy to satirize and the trick is done by subtracting from the people their racial stolidity. For this the satirist pays in an all round weakening of his characters, which become mono- tonous and in essence all alike. Thus all the people in Lost

Shepherd are inconclusive, incompetent in living and futile. They are, however, -redeemed by their grace, their. charm, their contagious belief in their own security and by the subtlety of their presentation. The hearty, back-slapping, selfish, unpleasant but pathetically bewildered vicar, his frivolous and more courageolys—but not sufficiently cour- ageous—wife, and above all Sebastian, - the traditional wicked untie of every good bourgeois family, are well—if superficialli—differentiated and their helpless natures exPosed with perspicacity. And Mr. Lushington is not conventional. Although the genial Sebastian is the foil for the Pecksniffian vicar, Mr. Lushington has no delusions about Sebastian. His magnetic .silences, his restlessness, 'his mysterious comings and goings, his enigmatic smiles are shown to be the mask of gi man who conceals an essential vacancy. He is charming, he.does_see _through the vicar, he does love his sister, but he is none the less the brainless, will-less: aristocrat.. Losing his money in the war he drifts and becomes a waiter. His shOcked. sister asks : ("t ' Are you behind the counter all the time ? '

All the time,' said Sebastian. Every day. Two hours off for lunch. Bit of all right. " . _ He has found his level. Fanny, his sister, is equally well- understood. One loves her and is maddened by her. Robert, the painter, whom she might have married, struck me as being a lay-figure, but the guileless self-deception of Fanny's daydreams about Robert is wickedly shown. Mr. Lushington's dialogue is particularly good: The remaining novels are by women, tougher and less sensitive creatures than these nonchalant males. Ifornet's Nest is about a doctor's dilemma in a provincial town. A woman has had her appendix out and someone has left a swab in the wound. The plot is inspired by formula, but

there is no futility about the book and it held me to the end. It provided another example of the strength that is given to characters when they are shown conditioned by--

their professions and their interests. Miss Ashton is, indeed, better at professional relationships than private ones, better in nursing home and surgery than in the drawing-room.

Well, there are quite enough drawing-room novels and there is quite enough polite irony going around. Miss Ashton's picture of a frightened woman going to consult a specialist, breaking the news of an inconvenient operation to hei husband, and then going into a nursing home and waiting, is a sound piece of narrative and observation. This woman's experience is much more real and effective than the rest of the book, and the hornet's nest she unwittingly stirs up is far less interesting than herself. So the novelist who concentrates on plot is led to negleCt the living thing which is really holding the arbitrary pattern together and which could so easily dispense with it. Miss Ashton, labouring a shade too conscientiously to keep the hornets buzzing, seems to have suspected the same.

These novels have all had good portraits of nice women in early middle age, but here Miss Martin Hare takes a heavy

fall. If This Be Error is about a widow who leaves England for the continent in search of self-realization and, after being made a fool of by a Russian gigolo, lives romantically in sin—and on the highest Stopesian principles—with a Pole whom she at last marries. It. is a solemn, priggish, sententious book with a lot of Marie Corelli's unction, none of her melodrama, and an occasional lapse into frightful coyness. The dialogue is written at the reader instead of between the characters.. The second part of the book is almbst a guide-book to Polish life and custom. Strangely enough, amid all this earnestness there do appear gleams of reality in the descriptions of the changing sensations of

the woman's love-affair with the Pole. But reality has a poor show in a book set on proving—what there was no necessity to prove—that it is not necessarily error to be in love with a Pole. I am sure " it is only human nature after all." The spectacle of conventional natures being unconventional on principle is a subject for irony, not for uplift. Its honest confusion should make the book very popular.