FICTION.
THE JUDGE.* IF a conjurer extracts a billiard-ball from his forehead we are impressed. If he extracts three in succession we are more impressed. But if he produce& an unending stream of balls our reverence is tempered by tedium ; the length of the entertain- ment, we feel, is not justified by variety—as it would be were the succession to give place to a white rabbit, an orange-tree, and a lady in pink tights. The only justification of the long novel is that the billiard-balls should give place to the Rabbit, the Orange-tree and the Lady. In more decorous language, there must be development ; and it is lack of development that clogs with a suspicion of tedium the great merits of Miss West's novel. There must be dramatic development, not mere sequence of incidents and reminiscences ; and psychological development, not portrayal of the same facts of character from slightly different angles—no mere accumulation of evidence for facts already ascertained, that is to say, but of evidence that leads the argument forward to further conclusions. Miss West says—very well indeed—all she has to say about her characters on the page on which she introduces them ; their subsequent actions and conversation are little more than a reiteration, and
• The Judge. By Rebecca West. London : Hutchinson. [7s. ed. net.]
it is here that tedium creeps in ; but it is warded off by the almost irrelevant interest one has in listening to Miss West's talk.
There is an entire lack of substance in the male characters that one presumes to be intentional on the part of the author ; but whether intentional or not we cannot but feel it to be detri- mental to the book as a whole. They are simply figments of the imagination of their womenfolk. Richard, the hero, is a rather crude creation of his mother's and his lover's, without any objective existence ; and the villains are just as unreal in conception, so that the male reader, unless he also can com- pletely identify himself with the two women, is likely to find them not only unconvincing but also a bore. In any case it goes to prove that Man's lack of comprehension of Woman is as nothing to Woman's complete ignorance of the workings of the mind of Man. But it is in her analysis of the characters of Ellen and Marion that Miss West's power is shown, and on which the final justification of the book rests. There are two distinct elements in her conception of Ellen, both of which she treats with a good deal of skill ; there is the " charming " Ellen, the feminine counterpart of the preposterous Richard—a purely romantic figure—and there is a second independent element of far greater worth, an intimate subjective treatment of the mind of an adolescent girl, which is very largely con- vincing and generally—though not always—genuinely unsenti- mental. In Marion there are also two conceptions distinguish- able, but they are combined into a character both of more colour and clearer outline. Marion is Richard's mother, betrayed thirty years before the story begins by the handsome young squire, and then betrayed again in an even worse sense by the man who married her under the pretence of giving her child his name. There is, then, in her an element of Type—of wronged womanhood and of the passionate mother. But apart from this her characterization is intensely individualized. It has that reality which comes from the minute copying of real life, and one suspects that Miss West has grafted externals of idio- syncrasy actually observed on to tragic experience typical of a whole class. Her large personality is in excellent contrast to Ellen's small, birdlike mother ; and Roger, the disgusting child of rape, lends emphasis, though of course he cannot lend reality, to the Glorious Richard. The book, as one would expect, is full of interesting technical devices, of shrewd and often humorous observation, of accurate subjective analysis : in short, it is plainly the product of a very keen intellect—a good novel that no one is likely to mistake for creative literature.
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