FICTION.
SATIRE AND IRONY,
Tim biographical element in modern fiction threatens to become a menace. In Victorian times, of course, the prac- tice was not unknown ; Diana Warwick had her prototype in real life and Lord Steyne had his. But these were rare instances and cited, until a few years ago, with becoming awe and disapproval. Moreover, for the " footballing world " (as Meredith anticipatively terms it) of 1880 the indiscretion that disclosed a Cabinet secret forty years before must have grown dim ; and Diana's chronicler, to do him justice, did little to enlighten us as to its outlines. He even, in a singularly lucid prefatory notice, called the incident a calumny against the dead ; whereas Mr. Osbert Sitwell, in a foreword of quite nnother tone, warns his readers that such of them as attempt to recognize, among his characters, portraits of themselves will be prosecuted for libel. The modern author is of a different temper from his obsequious and apologetic forerunner ; he does not expect to find his reader dear or gentle, nor does he call him so, even in fun.
Fiercely contemporaneous as Mr. Sitwell's portraits are, they do not show his talent at its best. How considerable that talent is the story called " Low Tide," with its brilliant description of (dare we say ?) Scarborough, abundantly shows. The characters of the two old ladies are absurd enough to attract his attention and (as is not the case in the other stories) poignant enough to enlist his sympathy. With a sort of fetocious tenderness he traces their downfall, from the time when prosperity enabled them to survive the philistine town's derision to their melancholy end. It would not be cynical to say that, of all themes, the total loss of a small fortune is one of the most painful. Mr. Sitwell squeezes the last drop of bitterness from it, heightening its effect by the introduction of fantastic circumstances and garish colours. There is always a pathos in incongruity, and the bent of Mr. Sitwell's mind leads him to prefer incongruity, with its: in- evitable suggestion of the ridiculous, to plain contrast. Of his other stories, " The Greeting " is perhaps the best. It sets out, successfully, to make one's flesh creep, whereas the longer and more ambitious Triple Fugue, like the other satirical .accounts of the humours and lollies of literary men, tends to lose itself in digression. Perhaps no one but Henry James has made a good story out of such material. Hardened satirist though he is, Mr. Sitwell descends to far into the arena and becomes, at times, indistinguishable frOm the objects °this dislike. The general effect of his book is turbu- lent, colourful and vague ; Victorian in its exu,berance, Victorian in its rich, heavy and often beautiful ornamentation ; but scarcely Victorian in spirit.
Miss Parkworth is exactly the reverse. In method it is chastened and pruned of all accretions that do not directly advance the action. Its style is bare, save for a singularly appropriate use ' of metaphor and simile. To each of the three long stories there are at most three generalizations— moral ones—which we feel Mr. Booth supplies as a con- cession. Satire, as Mr. Sitwell has shown, can feed on varied fare, but irony prefers human flesh and likes its victims near at hand. So Mr. Booth's persistent and most effective irony never divorces him from his characters ; in -fact, each dig reveals how uncomfortably close he is. But irony, in a novelist, has the defects of its merits : it shows the author taking sides, pulling the strings, robbing his characters of their freedom. When Mr. Booth applies it with (humanly speaking, of course) unanswerable effect to God, on page 211, we know that he is in league with destiny, that he is destiny, and that he is going to make the righteous suffer as much as God makes their suffer, and probably more. In effect, he continually calls upon them to repent of their rectitude and save their skins. • It is in his application of moral ideas to character, not in the ideas themselves, that Mr. Booth joins hands with a certain by no means negligible 'school of Victorian novelists, a school many of whom wrote, primarily, for the edification of the young. Like them he makes the good very the bad very bad ; like them, too, he assumes that the good get the shabby share - of life's bargain: But unlike them he does not hold in store for his martyrs a beautiful death-bed, transfigured faces and angelic ministrants at the last. We confess that, taken in its entirety, we prefer the Victorian version and find it less injurious to truth. Stories like " The Will of God " and " The Caretaker " that end on a note of intolerable unhappiness, almost involve the writer in a responsibility ; we grudge him his unfailing readability, his high spirits between disasters, above all the sense of humour which seems cynical in its setting of calamities, like dancing on a suicide's grave. It is not that Mr. Booth is heartless or inhumane ; but his extraordinary mastery over and truth of detail is combined with what One feels to be a rather facile and unconsidered a priori scheme ; "Take care of the parts," he seems to say, " and the whole will take care of itself." And so perhaps it would, if the excellence of the parts did not provoke one into examining the whole, to see whether the building is worthy of the stones. The edifice turns out to be a temple to pessimism, of quite a common design. But it is scarcely fair to join issue with Mr. BoOth over a question which is perhaps outside the domain of art, and one which it would be fruitless to discuss unless the high-quality of his work invited it.
The Green Hat has . a tragic ending, but nothing except the wreck of an expeniive motor-car and the 'death of a most unconvincing demi-mondaine are involved in it. Mr. Arlen is clever and witty, and aboveall, " in the know." This last is a quality that alienates one more than it should ; but it is ubiquitous in. Mr. Arlen's work. Everything, about his characters is costly except their emotions. These, though a great deal is spent on them, never appreciate in value, and unfortunately it is to the emotions that Mr. Arlen continually
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