FICTION
I Ant unable to place these three novels in order of merit. Each is a sound, respectable piece of work, but none has aroused me to any kind of enthusiasm, pro or contra. Perhaps Sohn Arnison, dry and honest, has the most certain merits, but the wrestlings of the Nonconformist conscience in East London is less recreative, perhaps, than unlikely goings-on in the mountains of County Cork, or, for that matter, in Miss Royde Smith's beautiful West Country. But although there is always much to be said for the last distinguished author's beautiful evocations of scenes and atmospheres, this time there is, surprisingly enough, nothing particular to record from her of character or spirit. So let us take Miss Margaret O'Leary first, if for no better reason than that her Munster dialogue is so ringingly true as almost to persuade us sometimes that the tale she spins is not bogus.
Lightning Flash appears to be only its author's second novel, which is surprising, because it has throughout a quality of almost too casual authoritativeness. (Miss O'Leary's first book, which I have never read, was entitled The House I Made, and won the Harmsworth Prize from the Irish Academy of Letters.) This book was first designed as a play and submitted to the Abbey Theatre, and in that form it won the enthusiastic admiration of W. B. Yeats, as is testified by a letter from him to Mr. Lennox Robinson, written from Rapallo in 1929, and reproduced here in a publisher's note. "Miss O'Leary should be the best realistic peasant dramatist who has yet appeared," he begins, and concludes, " Constantly as I listened to the play I thought of Fletcher's Mad Lover." I quote these lines, not in order to discuss them, but merely so that readers may be justly warned that the great Irish poet found in this story of Margaret O'Leary's seeds and poten- tialities to which this reviewer remains dully impercipient, and will therefore desire, no doubt, to examine for themselves a work which has been so greatly praised. But for myself I can only report in honesty that I found a strong, traditional, easily written tale of modern peasant life in Co. Cork—a work excellent in its reproduction of country routine, country humour and country talk, but bogus, it seemed to me, in its superimposition on that of a belle dame sans merci love- story.
Miss O'Leary's farmers, farmers' wives and eligible young country girls are all perfectly real people, and easily created against a moving, well-known life which it obviously does not at all strain her talents to establish. Indeed, she is somewhat too lavish and easy in her presentation of these properties. But her plot, if unremarkable, is good. The young widower-farmer who, wanting a wife and seeing before his eyes and waiting for his outstretched hand the very girl he wants, gets lured up the mountain and into hell apd heaven by a gipsy, Ellen Dunn, and becomes a scandal to the parish and a sorrow to his parents—until the gipsy dies dramatically and he has to go away from his land to ease his heart—all that is eternal stuff, but to be good, to persuade and enthrall, depends perilously and completely on the author's certainty of understanding of the gipsy. In this it seems to me that Miss O'Leary has gone utterly wrong. Ellen Dunn survives no test of imaginative reality. She is an embarrassing, moon- shine figure, whose antics and sentimentalities offend against all the realities which the author has built up so well about her, and which she should seem to threaten with the wildness and the voice of a storm. That was the passionate intention, naturally—but it has escaped in deadly prettiness. And so, in spite of many merits, the book fails, and drags to a too- long foreseen conclusion.
There is no moonshine in Mr. Thompson's study of a decent young Nonconformist's struggle to get control of his own soul and his own ideas. This is a very sober, decent book ; it is also sad, in its acceptance of the failure in the early days of this century of a religious movement into which much passion and talent were so generously poured. John Arnison, aged about sixteen, one supposes, and seeking to evade the assumption that, as son of a Methodist minister, he also will follow the call, begins his working life as a bank clerk in the City of London, at forty pounds a year. It is 1904 ; he lives in decent pious poverty with his widowed mother and his four young brothers and sisters. From this point we follow him, somewhat too carefully perhaps, through his sober mental processes and through the political changes about him, to the point where he becomes a Socialist and assistant editor on a small political paper. He makes friends who are rather playfully didactic and tiring ; he becomes a lay preacher for a time in the country and, for a shorter time, a clerk in a grocers' shop ; but he cannot, in spite of deep Christian feeling, become the minister his mother desires him to be. He keeps his integrity and his mother's love ; he is thoughtful, good and curiously interesting. His story is probably closely paralleled by that of many of the best men of middle age still working earnestly for the good of their fellows and aghast at the present impotence of high principles.
Miss Naomi Royde Smith has always seemed to me to do most justice to her great gifts when she fastens, almost un- mercifully let us say, upon one character, and by fearless analysis, working it to shreds while keeping it quiveringly alive, suddenly hands us back a transfigured, re-created, re- interpreted whole. Starting away with her attention riveted on someone whom we think we know and see roughly as she does, she almost invariably surprises or, more truly, illumines us in some quite remarkable way about what we had stupidly taken for the obvious. That is her particular gift ; but she can do other things as well, just ordinary novelists' things— such as creating countryside and ancient lovely houses, old churches, the pleasures of crafts and talents, and the humours of subtle family life. Here in Urchin Moor she has been content to lay out that kind of spread, but not without giving us the complicated psychological plot she delights in. Only for some reason she has not bothered to make the characters worth the complications or worth all the beauties of setting, weather, knowledge and local lore that she has heaped around them. However, this novel is big and rich and should appeal particularly to those who know Somerset and the Severn Estuary.
KATE O'BRIEN.
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