Fiction
Novels of Character
The Street Paved With Water. By Abney St. John Adcoek.
Roman Summer. By Ludwig Lewitilion. (Butterworth. is. 6d.).
HERE, for readers who desire neither sentimentality nor sensationalism, neither nastiness nor "cleverness," are four novels by writers who attempt a sane and sincere represenbi- tion of life. They are novels of character in a double sense. Not merely are they concerned with portraiture rather than with incident, but they all reflect character, in the old- fashioned sense of the word, in their creators. Here are four authors whose fidelity to their own artistic conscience is obviously their prime impulse, and whose occasional in- congruities are due to .the inherent difficulties of their art,. and not to any concession to popular taste.
Mr. Blake and Miss Adcock are both poets at heart. They are exceptionally sensitive interpreters of inward vision, and excel in presenting the dreams and joys and sorrows of child- hood. Tony Meldrum, in The Seas Between, is a boy of four- teen, living in idyllic happiness with his grandfather and a kindly aunt in a small Clydeside port. Below him spreads the pageantry of the shipping, while behind his little town rise the lonely hills, with their glens calling to romance and
adventure. Suddenly, however, Tony's paradise, exquisitely described, is shattered. His father, a West Indian planter, returns home, bringing with him a ilegro wife and a half-caste daughter. Joseph Meldrurn is a drunkard and a bully ; and a
black stepmother and yellowish sister make Tony an object of ridicule among his playmates and school-fellows. A bitter sense of frustration and inferiority seizes him, and the impact of brutality upon his tender idealism is depicted by Mr. Blake with rare insight, poignancy, and passion. With the death of Joseph Meldrum, a few years later, the story suffers a sea- change. Tony himself goes to the West Indies to manage the estate. There he meets a wealthy American girl who recipro- cates his love ; but he renounces her in order to look after his ungrateful sister. The latter stages of the tale, which ends with a glint of hope, are less convincing. and vital than the earlier part, though Mr. Blake's uncommonly fine gift for scene painting never fails him.
Miss Adcock, too, knows how to recall
"the hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower."
She shows us Nature as seen through the eyes of Welcome Tudway, a girl born in a barge on the Grand Junction Canal. Lot Tudway, her father, rough and impetuous, is implacably prejudiced against steam navigation, and infuriates his rivals, with their mechanical craft, by obstructing the canal with his '" monkey-boat." He is killed in a brawl, and, as the son whom he wished to succeed him has inherited the " softness " of his mother, for whom canal life was not good enough, Welcome herself is left to carry on the Tudway business and the Tudway tradition. The story, complicated by Welcome's love for a man of superior social status, moves to a dramatic and tragic climax, which is powerful in its way, but does violence, one feels, to the delightfully natural pictures of the earlier chapters. Welcome, the poor but happy little girl in her floating home, is much more attractive than Welcome, the hard and successful business woman ; and Miss Adcock, while never falling below a high level, writes best when her warn, human sympathy is most actively evoked.
In spite of the cynics, love does not always fly out of the window when poverty enters the door, and Miss Linford's title, with its suggestion of a universal rule, does injustice to her own convincing study of a single case. It is not love, but
mere physical attraction, which causes Ursula Fielding, the daughter of a comfortable Cheshire country doctor, to marry Kenneth Gandy, the handsome young Trade Union official whom she meets at a party given by a self-consciously philan- thropic hostess. Kenneth himself remains, in Miss Linford's hands, a somewhat wooden figure, but there is truth enough in the account of the sordid irritations and discrepancies that mar the young couple's life when they settle down in a small suburban villa in Liverpool. Ursula, like her parents, is conventionality itself, while Kenneth and his mother have in full measure their own kind of pride. With the exception of Kenneth—whose early death is too easy an evasion of difficulties —all the characters, with Aunt Agatha as a veritable master- piece, are finely realized, and the clash of temperament and tradition is set forth in a style that cleverly sustains a serio- comic vein.
John Austin, the hero of Roman Summer, is a young literary aspirant in an Ohio country town. His mother, a widow, is the centre of a complacently " cultured " set, against whose insincerities he revolts. He expects to find the secret of true culture by visiting Europe, and his disillusionment, in which his love for a very sensible young Jewess whom he meets in Rome plays a part, is followed stage by stage with penetration and subtlety. John at last returns home, determined not to worry about "culture," genuine or sham, but to devote his gifts as a writer to the sympathetic portrayal of the poorer and less sophisticated classes of his own countrymen. Without a touch of didacticism, Mr. Lewisohn impticity points a moral which lie has directly pleaded in his books of criticism : that culture cannot be donned or imitated, but must carve out its own foundations in spontaneity and honesty. Roman Summer is not exciting, but it is full of sound characterization, of good description, and of ripe wisdom.
GILBERT THOMAS.
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