FICTION.
IN the course of his metaphysical studies Arnold Waterlow comes across this sentence from Spinoza : " God loves Himself with an infinite intellectual love." Exactly what this means we are not prepared to say ; but in Miss Sinclair's attitude towards her own characters there is more than a suggestion of the passion, bright rather than warm, enduring rather than intense, which Spinoza ascribes to the Deity. She does not let Arnold's generosity and innumerable fine qualities carry her away ; she does not let him diffuse himself over the book, bringing sunshine to its many shadowy places ; she treats him as a kind of portable lamp with a limited sphere of radiance. As a result of this austerity, the book never really glows. We realize its elevation, and that it is full of deserts and noble acts, but the peculiar quality that gives self-sacrifice its irresistible appeal is somehow absent. Very likely Miss Sinclair is right in not trying to gild the nobler motives and emotions, and the comparative apathy with which we receive them is a reflection on us, who cannot relish virtue unless it be decorated and highly seasoned. When Arnold refused to tell his mother the source of her income, when he refused to divorce Linda, he acted from the highest motives. He did it because it was the right thing to do, not because some special quality of the act recommended itself to him and impelled him. He acted as it were from within his own nature, without any eclaircissement or revelation from outside. We cannot imagine him doing other than he did ; we cannot imagine any of the characters behaving except as Miss Sinclair makes them. They are rooted and grounded in their natures. And always, though.
there are in the book the sharpest contrasts of mood, ecstasy and despair, these very contrasts take place under the shadow of unhappiness. It is like a barometer whose readings, different as they are, fail to elate us because they are always on the rainy side of " Change."
One cannot sufficiently praise Miss Sinclair's management of her narrative. It moves with an inevitability that perhaps revenges itself upon the characters later on, but at the moment
satisfies utterly one's sense of order and completeness. Arnold NVaterlow's unhappiness begins early. " Go away, Sir," says his father, when Arnold, for the first-time able to open
a door, disturbed his parent's privacy. His mother, whom he adored, preferred his scapegrace elder brother. his consciousness expanded only to the realization of disasters : his father's drunkenness, the family's poverty. The only children with whom he seems to have played taught him things he should not have known. He went early to a school
whose chief characteristic was a dreary caddishness ; he gave battle to boys who traduced his brother's honour, only to be cursed by his brother for drawing attention to acts that called for concealment, not vindication. His father's death necessi- tated his entering the offices of a cheese-merchant and becom- ing impregnated with the smell of cheese. Later, his appren- ticeship to a tea-merchant displeased his mother because the merchant was a neighbour and, as she felt, her social inferior. The tea-merchant opened his eyes to the charms of philosophy, and this further estranged Mrs. Waterlow, who felt her son's faith was being undermined. He fell in love with a violinist who deserted him for a self-centred virtuoso ; he married her when the virtuoso had no more use for her, and when she once more fell under this person's spell he promised to take her back whenever she said the word. She did not say the word until, by saying it, she broke up the one clearly happy episode of his life—his attachment to Effie; if happy it can really be called when his mother, who lived in the same house, refused for weeks to speak to him on account or it. " Solomon Grundy," One thinks, " born on a Monday, ill on Thursday, very ill on Friday. . . ." Arnold does not die, and his history closes with a ray of hope which, in view of what has. gone before, one can only feel to be • illusory.
This 'depressing record is told with so much reticence and gravity that to dispute its verisimilitude seems almost blas- phemous. And yet Miss Sinclair does not quite succeed in
making her characters live. She manipulates their emotions and their conduct, makei them fall in and go about her business, relying upon them not to fail her. They never do. Their reasonableness and their unreasonableness are subject to her control ; their emotional states chime perfectly with the catastrophes, deaths, desertions, reinstatements with which she punctuates them. She predicates, as it were, a certain volume, a certain incidence, a certain continuity of emotion and.makes her characters illustrate it, always evoking admiration but not always an active, creative sympathy.
It seems as though she regards relationships between human beings as provisional, stepping stones to a more abstract, remoter experience, mystical but hardly at all sensuous.' The happiness which two people are able to confer on each ether passes naturally into this experience,
which is 'incommunicable and private
"Something suddenly shifted in his brain, the -wave drew back and in an instant, a flash, everything changed. - He saw the same hills, the same green fields, the same white river, but as if lifted to another level of reality, and shining with another light ; light intensely still, intensely vibrating. They were no longer spread out in space and time, but they stood as if inside his mind, in another space and in another time ; his mind held them, and was inseparably one with them. At the same moment he had a sense, overpowering and irrefutable, of Reality . . . While he looked his whole being was filled with a poignant, exquisite and unearthly bliss. His desire of Effie passed into his desire of God, it was stilled and satisfied in the unearthly bliss."
This fine and eloquent passage shows the trend of Miss Sinclair's mind. Fundamentally it is impatient of the concrete and avid of the abstract. Its selectiveness is intellectual rather than instinctive, it cannot tolerate dis- order and longs to lose itself in an 0 Allitudo.
L. P. HARTLEY.
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