FICTION
MEN LIKE BEASTS
MR. TASKER'S Gods were pigs. He would haul his family out of bed at half-past three in the morning to look after those pigs. He would curse them and buffet them and hurl them across the room if they were dilatory. He starved his daughter till she was a mere skeleton, crooked and dead- tired and spiritless. Nothing could touch his heart but those pigs of his. He fed them up on everything he could lay hands on ;_ turnips or mash or the corpse of a horse— it was all one to him. They should gorge themselves till they were as fat as balloons and as solid as iron. His master- piece of consideration came when he fed them with the corpse of his father. He felt a moment's compunction after that ; but it was more lest he should b^ condemned by the stupid scruples of mankind than because it seemed to him an unnatural act. He collected the bones and hid lam under a few loads of stone and thought no more of it.
But he was not unique in wickedness among the villagers of Shelton : far from it. There was only one man who was at all decent, and he was a half-wit. True, in the next village there was an amiable old clergyman, rather weak and doddering, vastly unpopular and incapable of fulfilling his duties with any enthusiasm. But li was the only hon- ourable man in South Egdon. What rogues and hypocrites the others were, peasantry and bourgeoisie alike ! One old scoundrel was terrified into righteousness by fear lest his dead wife should haunt him ; and he is made to appear a saint in comparison with his fellows. You would think those rosy children were innocent and charming ; but see them killing birds and torturing frogs and kicking each other as soon as they think your eye is off them ! You'd think the vicar, Mr. Turnbull, was a fine old English type ; but see him bully his wife and his son Henry, the half-wit ; see him occupied all his years in making. himself comfortable at everyone's expense ; see him cast an appreciative glance at any buxom wench he encorters ! Is it a wonder that he died miserably and disgracefully while he was away on a quite repulsive expedition ? The whole countryside was the haunt of 'malice and cruelty and sottishness and of every kind of vice ; and if virtue ever raised its head it was sure to be poleaxed.
On the title page Mr. Powys gives us a motto from TILL Pilgrim's Progress :—" Besides, who could have thought that so near the King's Palace there should have lurked such naughty ones.? " Who, indeed ? It seems to have become Mr. Powys's aim to persuade us that the English village is populated by fiends ; and; if he had written us an account of their villainies once and once only, we might have thanked him and gone more charily upon our way. We know well enough that villagers are generally kindly, decent, ordinary people, much like the rest of us : indeed, we may consider them better-natured on the whole ; more individual; more full of character; more hospitable, even. Still, we might happen upon such a nest of malefactors as Mr. Powys described. But since Mr. Powys continues to blacken rusticity, since he begins to -show an obsession with vice, we find ourselves less ready of conviction. It is not only that for a full and convincing account of villainy we must be allowed to see a-proportionate amount of goodness. The House with the Green Shutters was a dismal, squalid, unrelieved book, but it was good and affecting. But always, for full effect, even villainy must be described with a greater detach- ment (or a greater sympathy, if you will) than Mr. Powys displays : the issue must not be prejudged ; we must be allowed to form our own opinion upon the actions of the characters. Now Mr. Powys writes with much analytical power ; he can see hypocrisy and coarse behaviour where it would escape the observation of most of us. In other words, his novel is, in many details, illuminating. But he is committed by his insistence upon calling his characters wicked to a kind of subtle self-righteousness that throws us out of sympathy with him.
His failings are shown equally in his choice of good char- acters. He tends to identify virtue with weakness, and so sentimentalizes. It is almost impossible (though it has been common enough in fiction) for an adult whose mental develop- ment was arrested in childhood, a man typically stunted and incomplete, a " moron," to be poetically natured, of fine moral susceptibilities, a model for the imitation of mankind. Even in fiction there have been sound and real studies of such men; on the sympathetic side there is Dickens's Barnaby Budge ; on the antipathetic there is de Morgan's Joseph Vance. But the cult of the " beloved imbecile " is, in these days, rather shocking and reactionary. It is revealing to see that of the characters to whom Mr. Powys gives his approval and for whom he engages our regard one is virtuous through fear, one through vacuity, one through pusillaniMity and consumption, and two because they are women.
Nevertheless. Mr. Powys's new novel is much more acute, serious, and powerful than the majority of novels. We hope profoundly that he does not believe that he has found his métier as the chief modern illuminator of the depths of human bestiality. He will never be a patch upon the psycho- analysts in that branch of fiction. But if he should apply his gifts of vivid writing and subtle observation to a wider and less biassed exposition of life, he will-undoubtedly produce excellent work.
Mr. Ben Hecht is amusing hiniself in The Florentine Dagger, and he does it well. It is a murder story of originality. The hero is a descendant of the Medici family, Julien de Medici, a man of cultivation and of gentle, self-assured, romantic manners. But he is haunted by the fact of his ancestry, and afraid lest in himself there should be lurking the shadow of that ancient cruelty and vice. He is at once made melancholy and fascinated by the possibilities of wick- edness- that he feels to be his heritage. Whew the father of the girl he loves is murdered on the night when their engagement was to be announced, he is terrified lest he himself should have- committed the murder, unconsciously, reverting- in a moment of madness to the type- of his race. With an excessive coldness and subtlety of intellect, he examines all the clues to see if he can bring the guilt of the murder home to himself.
Meanwhile the daughter of the murdered man is willing to be suspected and convicted of the murder to clear someone else ; the detective engaged upon the case is spinning theories of a fantastic. and erroneous common sense ; and a doctor, an amateur psycho-analyst, is following up a hundred chimer- ical tracks. A situation of the utmost intricacy and ingenuity is created ; and over it all broods the borderland madness of de Medici. The conduct• of- the story is admirable till-
close to the end ; and then Mr. Ben Hecht forgets to clear up one or two of the false trails upon which he had sent us. In a book whose main claim upon our attention is its ingenuity, the fact that a few loose ends are left about- becomes very disheartening. We finish reading without the achievement of the merely mechanical satisfaction that a perfectly con- trived murder story may bring. Our recompense is in the unusual grace of the writing, and the air of intelligence that is constant throughout.
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