FICTION
Ely FORREST REID
The Joyful Delaneys. By Hugh Walpole. (Macmillan. 8s. 6d.) The Marriage Will Not Take Place. By Marguerite Steen. (Collins. 8s. 6d.)
Ten-a-Penny People. By Jim Phelan. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) Common People. By William Cameron. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.)
" Naive, vivre et mourir dans la mime maison," was the prayer of Sainte-Beuve. It is also the prayer of the Delaneys—" Do you know Delaneys have lived in this house for two hundred and fifty years ? "—and, because it is innocent and wise, Sir Hugh Walpole, who is the most benevolent of deities, grants them their desire, though to do so he has to exercise an old-fashioned privilege of divinities, and work something in the nature of a miracle. But i for one shall not reproach him. I should not quarrel with him even if he went further than he does. Has he not told us that he is a romantic novelist, and; artistically, is it not a perfectly legitimate aim to create out of the crude broken material of life a pattern expressing an ideal, whether of kindness or of beauty ? It can hardly be the latter, perhaps, without poetry, and Sir Hugh's talent, which is a robust and. simple gift for story-telling, is not poetic : on the other hand he does wish everybody to be happy. In the days of my tiOyhood the ending of The Joyful Delaneys would have left me scornfully indignant. Like Shakespeare's young gentlemen of France, " as sad as night for only wantonness," no novel pleased me which did not end with "waste and a broken heart." I was not averse from gaiety in the earlier scenes, but the final scene must be tragic, or else I felt myself to have been cheated. Being, I suppose, temperamentally pessimistic, it was only from writers more pessimistic still that I could extract any comfort. Nowa- days I prefer an inconclusive ending—one that in the imagination echoes and murmurs on after the book is closed, like the voices of the unseen sailors in Maeterlinck's Les Sept Princesses : " L'Adantique ! PAtlantique ! Nous ne reviendrons plus ! Nous ne reviendrons plus ! "
The ending of The Joyous Delaneys has no such " dying fall." It is bright and cheerful, everything is tidied' p, and the hearth swept clean. Well, I am satisfied ; I accept Lord Ragadoon as fairy godfather. I did not want Claude Willoughby to die of starvation, or old Lady Millie Pake to spend the rest of her days in a dreary bed-sitting-room in Bloomsbury. Nobody can draw ancient and impoverished gentlepeople, survivors from another age, more sympathetically than Sir Hugh Walpole. For this he has exactly the right touch of mingled humour and tenderness, a kind of tact that avoids sentimentality where sentimentality would be an error in taste. He knows their virtues and their failings : they may not-be clever, but they have the distinction of good-breeding.
In this book there are a lot of characters, and nearly all of them are agreeable. Most of them, too, are friends of Fred Delaney and his wife, or of their grown-up son and daughter. The threads of their stories, grave or gay, are deftly interwoven, producing the effect of a single story, with modern London in the background. It cannot have been an easy thing to do, nevertheless it has been done. There is some tragedy in the tale, and some meanness, but there is a great deal more of happiness and generosity. Particularly good is the scene where Meg Delaney comes • to old Willoughby's rescue, when he is being terrorised and threatened by the odious Brocket. Per- sonally I found the whole romance very pleasant, and should place it among the best of the Walpole novels.
And now for realism. I wonder how far the code of sexual morality prevalent in contemporary realistic fiction actually reflects that of the average man and woman of today. In most of these worki it is assumed that mere physical infidelities are of slight importance so long as one remains faithful in spirit to the person with whom one has thrown in one's lot. Yet this surely is fallacious. Nothing can be unimportant spiritually that necessitates deception, and every lie, acted or, told, must further the process of deterioration. Miss Mar- guerite Steen, in The Marriage Will Not Take Place, accepts the modern view. It is quite clear that it is with the aim of being true to life that Miss Steen gives the father a mistress, the mother a lover, one of the daughters a succession of lovers, and another a pre-marital sexual adventure. But is this true to life—average life ? Judging from my own, provincial experience, I should answer No. These characters are intended to be ordinary middle-class people : their conduct, I think, makes them exceptional. Yet the novel will please, because it has an interesting plot. Gaynor, the heroine, falls in love with Dominick Probert, a young architect, handsome and successful, but below the surface a ruthless egotist. The story tells how she gradually falls out of love with him, and in the end, though not till the last moment, finds that she cannot face the marriage. It is competently done. We know, from the title, what is going to happen, but the feeling of suspense is maintained. In some respects, however, the psychology seems to me dubious. The father adores Gaynor, yet he has planned to -get, immediately after her. marriage, a divorce from his wife so that he may marry his mistress. I find it difficult to reconcile these things. Miss Steen writes fluently, though now and then•with a surprising insensitiveness of ear. In the dialogue, for instance, the word " ciarling " is repeated till one comes at last to dread it.
I am afraid, however one may regard Mr. Phelan's new novel, it must be clear that it ought not to have folloVed Lifer. Actually, the rapidity with which it has done so makes one hope that it is an earlier work revived. For it is in every respect weaker than its predecessor. True, one can recognise the same hand in both tales—particularly in the repetition of certain technical devices. But while these were -effective in Lifer, in Ten-a-Penny People they seem mere tricks of style. Moreover, a marked feature of the earlier novel was the impar- tiality with which the subject was treated ; in his new story, where the subject is the struggle between workers and employers, Mr. Phelan, presenting the case for labour, writes more like an advocate than an artist. To me, however, the fatal defect of the book was that it contained no character in whom I could take an interest. I opened it, prepossessed in its favour; I closed it, feeling bored and disappointed. The first scene, describing with brutal realism the fight between a father and a son, I imagined was' to have some future psychological significance which would justify it, and the boy, I supposed, was to be the hero. But it is not so ; at the end of the chapter he vanishes, and when he reappears, some years later, he is only one figure among many. The chief characters really are Tom Rogan the blacksmith and his brother Dick—both Reds. But Tom is the stock Communist of fiction, and Dick, who has just been released from gaol, is singularly unconvincing. The construction of the tale is scrappy. The material is there, but it is material in the raw, untouched by imagination, jotted dawn hastily without selection.
Mr. Cameron's Common People, also dealing with working- class life, is a vastly better book. Here the whole thing is alive, and the lights and shadows are subtly blended. There is tragedy, less violent but infinitely more moving than anything in Mr. Phelan's novel, and there is happiness too. Pa is a genuine creation ; so is his son Dick ; so is Connie, the girl. who is dying in a hospital. The story is Dick's, and it is the story of the struggle between his affection for Connie, who loves him, and his more commonplace relations with Annie, the girl to whom he is engaged to be married. But he has known Connie first (she has a finer nature, and is far more intelligent than anybody else he does know), and now that she is alone and ill he refuses, in spite of Annie's jealous possessiveness, to desert her. The situation rings true, and is admirably treated. It leads inevitably to a rupture with Annie, of whom, in her hospital, Connie has never even heard.' But Dick's visits, his kindness, and the chance of happiness,' bring the dying girl back to life. It is indeed more than a chance, for he tells her of a place he has discovered by the sea,, where they can be _together, far from the LoUdon sluins that have ruined her health. Then the tragedy happens ; Annie is going to have a baby ; Dick must marry her. And Connie, when he tells her, without reproach, without protest, " turns her face to the wall." This really is a good novel, very lifelike,. very human, and I can quite sincerely recommend it.
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