FICTION
By FORREST REID The Priory. By Dorothy Whipple. (Murray. 8s. 6d.)
I HAVE no prejudice against a happy ending to a novel when . both theme and characters make it the probable ending, but I have what appears to me a quite reasonable objection to a settling-up-all-round ending, because it mars an illusion and reminds me that what I am reading is, after all, only a story.
In life there is never this settling up ; all between birth and
death flows on continuously, and, as the melancholy Herak- leitos pointed out long ago, " a man's character is his fate." But older novelists felt it a duty to their readers to leave nothing in uncertainty. Even to so modem a novel as The Tragic Muse Henry James added a postscript, giving us a glimpse into the future of his persons major and minor, the result for me being that the whole thing momentarily became a puppet-show, with Henry, strings in hand, extremely visible behind it. Mrs. Whipple in her excellent novel, The Priory, does not, I admit, go so far as this, but for my taste she does too obviously arrange matters at the end, taking everybody into account and giving them all a second chance, as it were,
though without actually mentioning that they lived happily ever afterwards. That, nevertheless, is the effect, and it is less realistic than the chapters which precede it, particularly than the earlier chapters.
The novel certainly has a good subject. Major Marwood, his two grown-up daughters and his sister Victoria are living in a big house close to Saunby Priory. The Major has not enough money to run the estate, his chief interest in life is cricket, and, Most extravagantly, he keeps a professional
cricketer in his employment—the gay and charming Thomp- son. He decides to marry again, and chooses the middle-aged and docile Anthea. Anthea is not merely docile,. but also very much in love, and it is only when she discovers she is going to have a baby . that discord is created. She is a creature transformed'; she brings the admirable Nurse Pye into the house ; and the two of them at once start a vigorous campaign in the interests of Baby .(not yet arrived) and against every- body, and everything that may stand in his way—the Major's passion for cricket, Thompson, the selling of farms to get out of temporary difficulties, the girls, Aunt Victoria, lazy servants, the ,general atmosphere of improvident procrastination. All this 'part of the novel—and fortunately it is a considerable part—is brilliantly original and convincing. It is fresh, delightful, absorbing, and one accepts it with gratitude as one did the novels read in boyhood. In fact, if Mrs. Whipple had left it at that this notice would have been a panegyric. But the girls marry, and in the picture of their married life the beaten tracks of fiction begin to emerge. One guesses what is going to happen, because one has read it before, and tire- somely it does happen. It quite easily might happen, it very likely would happen ; I do not dispute this, but the fresh- ness is gone. Y,et I sincerely recommend the novel. It is not all that I hoped it was. going to be, that the first two hundred pages indeed are, but it rises far above the level of ordinary commercial fiction, as far, for instance, as did the romances of Rhoda Broughton in their long-vanished day.
The first thought suggested by Double Entry is that Mr. Durine's theory of time has been a godsend to novelists,' the second that, after all, before his ingenious theory ever was enunciated, tales of this kind had been. written. Among others therewere the stories of E. Nesbit, and it is these, much more than such a subtle and d elaborate experiment as The Sense of the Past;that one recalls when reading Miss Rutherford's novel.
The Nesbit stories, are comic, Double Entry is tragic; but the simplicity of apprOach in both cases is the same. Confronted with certain objects, Veronica Mordaunt travels back into the
past, the life to which she returns being, as usual, not only highly eventful, but somewhat melodramatic. Her husband, an unpleasant archaeologist, exploits Veronica's gift for his own purposes, though he cannot help seeing that the practice is injurious to her. He exploits it once too often, however, with
the result that he himself becomes a shade doomed to wander on the desolate banks of Acheron. This may seem a flippant description of the tale, but then I do not feel that Miss Ruther- ford really has accomplished much more than to extract a thriller from the Dunne speculations. The genuine touch is lacking, the touch founded on personal experience. Had Miss Rutherford never read Dunne, she never would have written this story, and that is why it comes into the Nesbit category rather than into that of The Lost Stradivarius or The Sense of the Past, and why it left me unimpressed. If one takes the supernatural seriously, the use of it as mere material for a story must always seem a kind of betrayal. Miss Rutherford, I cannot help thinking, does not take it seriously, and therefore, to my mind, she fails to make it convincing.
Golden Furrow is about English agricultural life. Like The Mayor of Casterbridge, it might have had for sub-title "The life and death of a man of character," though the book is not in the least in the Hardy tradition. There is no charm in the descriptions—there are, indeed, very few descriptions—and the tone of the whole chronicle remains slightly sordid. Doubtless this is true to the facts. A sensitiveness to the beauties of nature may, but probably does not, exist among the actual tillers of the soil. It existed in Hardy, who was primarily a poet, and he moulded his characters and presented them so that they should harmonise with his landscape. There are scenes in the Wessex novels that are like hymns to the earth and to the Earth Mother. But Bob Sewell, Mr. Basham's hero, is simply a hard-working, ambitious young man, with a pro- nounced thriftiness of nature which comes out in his very love-making. At twenty he yields to a generous and romantic impulse ; after that the thought of the Savings Bank is never far away.
The novel is a first one, and has some promising qualities. The point,of view is objective ; the sincerity admirable. With the exception of Colonel fiavikins, who is a complete failure, the characters are real, while the story is kept as Bob's, and he remains consistent from the age of twenty till his death at sixty-five. There is nobody one particularly likes, and nobody one dislikes. The elderly light-o'-love comes out best perhaps, and Colonel Hawkins was certainly intended by the author to emerge from the rank and file. But "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette &dere?" I have a suspicion that at present any hint of mysticism lies outside Mr. Basham's world, and I can't see why he even wanted Colonel Hawkins, since elsewhere he keeps closely to what he has observed.
Like those of Mr. Wodehouse, Mr. Benson's novels are designed as entertainments. Either they amuse us, in which case we read them ; or they do not, in which case.we refrain. I hasten to add that there may be some that are wholly serious, but I happen to have hit only on the lighter tales, and Trouble for Lucia is among them. It is, too, an excellent example ; the humour being unforced, and the satire shrewd. The characters, moreover, do not strike us as really unpleasant, though they possess most of the weaknesses of humanity, are snobs, gossips, liars, humbugs, while their wits are employed almost solely either to gain their own ends, or to score off their neighbours. What they say and do is, in fact, extremely lifelike. Much of Mr. Wodehouse's comedy springs from exaggeration and farcical invention (Bertie Wooster, after all, is an invention, and so is Jeeves) ; Mr. Benson relies more on observation and selection. Yet the result, doubtless, also is an exaggeration. No country town can ever have been quite like Tilling. For one thing, we see it entirely through a little group of leisured persons whose main occupations are to play Bridge and talk scandal ; while we see even these persons at selected moments in their lives, when the unseemly and ludicrous are paramount. Lucia has been elected Mayor of Tilling; and inevitably be- comes the centre of petty intrigues and jealousies. All these people—comprising her particular set—are bosom friends, of course, yet all rejoice secretly in one another's discomfiture. Mr. Benson keeps it up amazingly. There is not the trace of a sentimental interest in the book, and not really any story to speak of, yet we miss neither. It is the lightest of light reading, to be sure, but it is deft and amusing.
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