FICTION
GLOOM IN THE HEDGEROWS
Mary Glenn. By Sarah Gertrude Millin. (Constable. 6s. net.) EVERYONE realizes how important it is that novels should begin well. The reader knows that it is the novelist's duty to rouse his interest with the first sentence ; and the novelist himself seems nowadays to feel his responsibility so deeply that he MOWS heaven and earth to find a brilliant opening. Mr. Powys succeeds admirably. The sentence and the situation with which he begins would catch and hold the most wandering attention " Some of the most significant encounters in the world occur between two persons one of whom is asleep or dead."
And he 'does not keep us waiting long to learn what it is all about. Rook Ashover, the twenty-first possessor of an English country house, and the only heir of the family except for an invalid brother, is endangering the continuance of his line. His mother is trying to force him to marry a cousin ; but all the interplay of human relationships which centre in his childlessness affects him disagreeably. He continues to live with a more or less tinmarriageable woman, always trying to find out, in some rather baffled, pessimistic way, a reason or justification for the universe as he conceives it to be.
In some sense, of course, the problems Rook Ashover sets himself are also Mr. Powys's own. There are two opposed schools of countryside novelists. One of them, like the fine ladies and gentlemen of eighteenth century France, sees a Boucher or a Watteau in every rural prospect, swards smoother than plush, dotted with carefully laundered lambs ; on the grass human beings of a. more than mortal sweetness disport themselves with idyllic grace. The other school, more serious and respectable, but _equally prejudiced, sees, when it looks over the landscape, a menace in every cloud, a snake in every orchard, and Nature hovering with bloody and malicious claws over all animal, vegetable, and human life. Mr. Powys belongs most definitely to the second class. He writes :—
" The gamekeeper and his wife were engaged in feeding the fowls, assisted by their idiot son. This child, whose half-articulate utterances and facial distortions would have been horrible in a city, fell naturally into his place among wilting hemlocks and lightning. struck trees and birds eaten by hawks and rabbits eaten by weasels."
The falseness of this pessimistic attitude is plain, since all hemlocks are not wilted nor all trees blasted by lightning : nor is an idiot child any less saddening in a village than in a town. It really is a falseness, a patent desire to be romantic and gruesome at any cost, since in his best passages Mr. Powys shows himself peculiarly sensitive to
" the scent of young leaves and the new-grown grass "
and since he speaks of the " bounty of the gods " when to ROok Ashover comes
" the old mysterious acceptance of life upon earth, of birth and death, of pleasure and sorrow . . . and he had the feeling that Whatever might be the issue of all these things for him, it was enough that they had been just as they were."
There has been a surfeit lately of gloomy and distorted books about villages, and a fashion for cheap and shabby-black magic in all of which the desire to startle is obvious. One tires very quickly of bogies, born of a muddled and lazy philosophy ; and Mr. Powys must forgive his readers if they grow impatient with his idiot-boy and " the oozy stalks of half-dead bluebells," and refuse to be really impressed. There are many ugly things in life, under the hedgerows or elsewhere, but so gifted and sensitive a person as this author need not go out of his way to dilate on them when he can equally well exalt us instead with a vision of that beauty and rightness in life in which he hiMself believes so strongly. He never convinces us that he believes in the existence of a malignant blight on the world's face. And when he follows his intuition, and relies on his sensitive perceptions without being side- trackedinto- klooni, he can suggest the subtle_ degrees and half-tones of many diverse and enthralling kinds of human emotions amazingly well, and write vividly and with power. He is, in fact, so able and in many ways so likeable a writer that one' is impelled to quarrel violently with him for his quite unnecessary errors of judgment, 'since Ducdame is, in spite of everything, a good and intelligent novel, and the story of Rook Ashoyer'S final surrendei to family claims is, some crudities excepted, well imagined and ingeniously told. Much Of the' serenity, and poise that Ducdaine hicks is in Mrs. Millin's Mary Glenn. Her tale of two South African farmers and their wives is a simple one,' simply written in a low, unassuming tone : its restraint is the kind that Comes of a real sense of proportion. There are painful and pitiful things in the story of ambitious Mary Adams, and her marriage with the gentlemanlike but characterless Elliott Glenn, but they are seen with wise eyes, and not spoken of merely to horrify. Mary had ached to rise in the world, and all she managed to do was to tie herself to a man whom she despised. But one day a situation far worse than the abiding meanness of an unsatisfying married life faced her. Her little boy was lost in the bush while his father was in charge of him. How Mary Glenn could ever fintive the husband whom she did not love for destroying the one thing she did love, is Mrs, Millin's to tell, in her own quiet way. Tragedy is here in a homely dress, but the telling :of it 'moves us : it does not horrify. And though these farmers and their wives are made known to us for a little time of their lives only, they seem to live apart from our knowledge of them, and beyond the confines of their own story.
Up Hill and Down Dale. By Eden Phillpotts. (Hutchin- son. 7s. 6d. net.)—Short stories of which the scene is mostly laid in Devonshire. They are told in Mr. Eden Phillpotts' familiar manner, and those many thousands of people who have :enjoyed his play The Farmer's Wife will find them very pleasant reading. On the other hand, if any spectators of The Farmer's Wife were not entertained by it, they may like this; book less, for they will find human weaknesses and virtues treated here in much the same way as in the play, with a sure, if perhaps not altogether subtle touch, and tinctured with the same cheerful spirit of bucolic romanticism,
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