FICTION.
MR. DE LA MARE.*
Mn. DE LA Mane's novel, The Return, was first published in 1910. It did not at that date perhaps reach a very wide public, and therefore, from one point of view, to most people it will he a new book. Its having been written twelve years ago puts it, however, in a very different relationship to the poetry which Mr. de la Mare has lately produced, or to his last novel, The ..Reazoira of a Midget. The Return has none of the minute, almost laboured, meticulousness of the Midget. It is written on broader lines and is infinitely easier to read ; indeed, so exciting is the central notion of it that it is a book which it is often impossible to lay down. On the other hand, there are rather more set descriptions of scenery : the reader is less often startled by an exquisite phrase. Mr. de is Mare has more rarely found out the perfect word. Again, the detail with which he was so lavish in the Midget is largely absent in The Return, and we are even left rather in the air as to the age of the principal character and the sort of town in which he lives, though both are details important to the theme. The opening of the story is almost perfect. Arthur Lawford has had a severe attack of influenza and finds himself with the usual after effects of languidness and melancholy. His wife is a hard, competent, successful woman ; he feels that his continued uselessness has grown a little irksome to her and he has got into the habit of taking long, rambling walks. It is September, and on one mild and golden evening he finds himself in a little, old, mossy churchyard of a village two or three miles from his, home. He begins reading the inscriptions- on the tombstones and then, very tired, sits down on a seat and there goes to sleep. It is dark when he wakes up, and he feels much refreshed indeed, he experiences a sort -of odd elation, and, fearing to be late for dinner, he finds no difficulty in shaking off his former languor and half running the two or three miles home. It is dark when he gets to his own house. He goes straight up to his dressing-room, lights his candles and looks into the glass. A perfectly unknown face looks out at him ! Tableau ! Of the further involutions and complications of the story it would not be fair either to .Mr. de la Mare or the reader to tell, for, serious in a way as is the sub-purpose of the book—an argument about the nature of human personality—there is much in it of the good shocker. Some a the characterization is very good, though the types which he has chosen to show are by no means original. There is the entirely odious, cold-hearted, domineering, yet conven- tional and timid woman, Sheila, Lawford's wife ; there is the delightful, tired old clergyman, Mr. Bethany ; there is Miss Sinnet, the old maiden lady, whose appearance in the story is all too brief, and finally the brother and sister Herbert (out of a book by one of the Miss Brontes), who live in the old wooden house by the weir.
Perhaps the arguments about human personality do not really take us very far, though we are not sure that a re-reading of the book might not reveal further signification in some of the half-hints that are given, but we are certainly shown a very good picture of poor Lawford's mind divided against itself when the face has begun, in the rather awful words of the vicar, " to sink in."
A whole number of possible explanations are offered to the reader, some ridiculous, some hair-raising, but as presented by Mr. de la Mare, very few incredible. All the characters except the intolerable Sheila are treated with sympathy, especially the non-material characters. It is a book calculated to make the ordinary tale of wonder or of haunting look extraordinarily coarse-grained and unsubtle. We recommend it to the fastidious whose blood is frequently checked in the congenial exercise of running sold by the incapacity of too many of our modern magicians.
Previous page
