Fi ction
The House in Haarlem. By Arthur van Schendel. Translated 8s. 3d.) THE first two novels on this week's list are of singular value and beauty. Literary virtue, lifting them clean out of the ruck of contemporary fiction, might in any case for that reason tempt a reviewer to consider them together, in search of a common factor of formal excellence—but in fact that which they share is an isolated spiritual passion—a pre- occupation with man as a conscious sinner.
This in itself is a most blessed change. In the last twenty years all the best or, at least, all the most celebrated fiction, sailing under one ideological banner or another, has devoted itself to what it would describe as man's rights, either individual or social ; it has taken as holy beyond argument those little outfits of passion, greed and intro- spection with which we have te try to get along, and which in their absurd results might--well seem at long .view to be no more than whimsicalities.; and having set this nonsense down with considerable art, imaginative writers may now perhaps be feeling hurt by the ill-use to which mankind has put all the penetrative light which they shed for it upon its own sensitiveness, its grievances, its inherited impotence.
What they left out—that being the modish form of senti- mentality—was the sense of shame. They forgot that the law of good and evil is as inexorable, or must always seem so to us, as that which fixes and directs the stars—and that, being immense and impersonal, it must, lodged in our wretched personal breasts, wield a much greater power therein, for havoc or for triumph, than can any merely personal difficulty, physiological or circumstantial, sown and nurtured in one mere lifetime. To be ashamed.; to know that self- realisation is the least of life and that its real purpose is immeasurably more ambitious ; to thirst after escape from
all that " personalness " which has lately been in vogue—that is a really dangerous and dramatic situation for us poor wretches to be in, and has in fact been everlastingly at once the nostalgia and the dynamic of those few human beings who have been greatly good, or bad enough to be worth history's notice.
But here are two novelists who have chosen to examine the working of that violent force within the frames of the small, the weak and unready. The Dutch writer Arthur van Schendel, whose Grey Birds, published in English a -fev% months ago, was an introduction for many of us to his high, unflinching, admonitory talent, reiterates now, in The House in Haarlem, the cold Calvinistic message that sin and retri- bution are the true scales in which to measure life. He,tdoes not preach this word ; he is not himself involved. He offers simply a picture, as full as he can make it, of sin and, its consequences at work on simple lives. This second book is more painfully tragic, perhaps, than Grey -Birds, since its chief character drags the whole story to a fearful climax wink he is himself still only a youth, having had no time to find any alleviation from his lifelong struggle with_ predestined sin and inherited guilt. But although its agony is more morbid and compressed than that of the earlier book, it has also, for heightening of it, a richer beauty of setting. The everyday life of humble shopkeeping people in Haarlem in the 'eighties and 'nineties of the last century is beautifully written here ; with frugality, indeed, but thereby only the more effectively to show its kindliness, its order and good sense. And these virtues, glowing gently on each page, keep hope and admira- tion stirring in the reader, even though they are helpless against the slow tide of tragedy. A story not for everyone perhaps, but not the less distinguished for that, and, read in this remarkably beautiful English translation, unlikely to fade from sensitive memories.
But The Power and the Glory, less evenly perfect, less ruthlessly observant, has, it seems to me, an advantage over the Dutch novel, in that it offers the Catholic rather than the Calvinistic message about sin. Mr. Graham Greene's story is about a little humble, unimportant, sinful priest in Mexico ten years ago—an outlawed priest with a price on his head ; feared, as likely to get them into trouble, by many who should protect him, and despised by others because he is a drunkard, a " whisky-priest." Like other priests he should, to be safe, have married or fled the State in which he had practised vocation. But although he knows the sins of the flesh and has an illegitimate child, he cannot bring himself to do the former ; nor can he forgo his perilous right to say Mass and hear confessions as chance permits. Yet he is always a sinner, weak and tormented by his own weakness. And obstinately aware of a strength not his, through which he holds his calling, and in the name of which he must try, no matter how dismally he fails and fails again, to redeem his own failure somehow, sometimes, before the end.
He has miserable adventures, and at last he is taken by the police, and he is executed. He goes out to his death against the police-yard wall more certain than ever that he is a wretch and a fool. " I have done nothing for anybody. I might just as well have never lived . . .' he was not at the moment afraid of damnation—even the fear of pain was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all." And the last sentence is : " He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint." This is something new and painful for us to consider, the humble and contrite heart. Rarely can it have been exposed to our consideration with a more delicate under- standing, with more unmerciful mercy.
Other Gods, being the sort of competent novel of which our time is far too prolific, cannot stand up at all in the company of these other two. It is by Mrs. Pearl Buck, but though it opens in China, and eventually, vid America, gets to the Himalayas, it is just an ordinary readable tale of a refined young American girl who marries a dumbbell American boy who becomes a national idol by a fluke, and is a fool. There is a lot of cumbersome thoughtfulness, and wealth and refinement are glossily presented. It was the first book which I have ever read by the recent Nobel Prize winner, and I confess it was a great disappointment to me.
Ram O'Banni.
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