Fiction

By SEAN ,0 Sparkenbroke. By Cliarrers .Morgan. ' (Macmillan. 6s. 6d.) Creed. By Margiad , (Blackwell. 7s. 6d.) • -

A Mari Forlhld. 'By Else Reed. (Cape. , 6d.)• Sparkenbroke is not a novel which a reviewer would willingly chonSe for synopsis and review---7the appreciation of its delicate and leisurely graces and its considered Wisdoms ik•hindeted. by the necessity for reading week what should take „ at least a month. Who, for instance, could do justiee. to Mafia" under less than several months ? But it is a book which many readers, free` of any other, 'compulsion than the heart's deSire, for beauty of word and picture, and other deeper needs, such as the heart's love for a sensitive metaphysic culled by brooding from experience, will _read and re-read with scarcely alloyed delight, often pausing to consider continent or turn a phrase on the palate, and remember long after for .its sweetly tormenting aroma as of flowers whose perfume blows from beyond the Styx. , Not that Sparkenbroke is, in the facile phrase, " a hook,40 be sipped "-:--not if that suggests idle pleasures ; like Maiins

to which it bears much more resemblance than to any thing.py Moore, in spite of innumerable, regrettable echoes of Moore, it requires concentration. And that suggests the one: perhaps'

the Only weakness of this novel,- and had better pleaded at the outset—namely that 'the need for -cencentration. "does not arise solely from the embedded thought: but front a 'kind of hedonism in the picture, which clashes with the idealism of the thought, and from an accompanying narcotic in the style which has to be resisted continually ; both again reminiscent—there may be no other connexion—of Ainico Moorini (as Moore called; his more wilful self). Sparkenbroke himself, speaking or Charles Reade, admires the rough but bold way in which that school of writers thrust through to their ends, and sighs that the writers of this day dally too often to contemplate the bubbles on the stream ; it is. a fair-enough comment on the method of Mr. Morgan Whose touch is much too fondling ; this is, however, not to say

dallying and oblique, for that is his method.

However, these things arise from the nature of the material itself. Piers Tenniel, Lord Sparkenbroke, is a poet, and, in ' so far as any word could define him, a practising Platonist. His mind is preoccupied with intuitions of the nature of essential reality ; he is a coarser Shelley who is constantly being moved by the intensity of his , desire for the absolute fullness of experience to live in the imagination in ecstatic union with the essence of all being. To him the radiance of eternity shines always through the stain of life, and art, when it is vision, love, when it is not merely sensual but the " spring of being," are with death-- his major preoccupation--ecstasies that can burn away the body. and create an absolute soul. This emphasis on the self, the vehicle and enemy of ecstasy, creates his conflict. CodeS, behaviour, the reason-formed character, the law-governed conscience, are his abomination—or should be, if I understand him rightly—and the imagination that lies to itself is his only sin. When he falls in love with Mary Leward, a mere girl, and when she marries his dear friend George Hardy, who does believe in codes (though he also believes in Sparkenbroke) the stage is set for the conflict in the -novel whose advances and retreats and crises illustrate Sparken-

broke at the same time that they have significance only because he is what he is. Love, poetry, the idea of death, considered so Metaphysically - become, of necessity,

ionalised.- We feel the emotions of • these three people .

rather as, in the mornings, we feel the light without perceiving it, and acknowledge their reality, sense their meaning, and are affected by them much as, between sleeping and waking, we acknowledge sounds as yet entangled in dream.

It is the price Mr. Morgan has to pay for writing poetry as prose and metaphysics as fiction; but somethingPater, did something similar, though his Cyrenaicism, being • a code of behaviour, kept him much nearer to earth. There is no comparison with Moore whose . style was mere theatrical "make-up," who had no metaphysic, and no philosophy, and no love for common reality. Mr. Morgan - has, like Moore, his frozen frieze, his too clever transitions; his. inevitable buckram prettiness—I have noted so many exam- ples that I think few readers will find difficulty in admitting the justice of this The opening. of the affairlbetiveeit, Spar- kenbroke and Mary struck me as being painfully suggestive of

- . .

the novelettishness of Sir. Owen Asher ; • and I must repeat. because it jarred ontrie throughout, that to-have been graceful •• about things like death was an evasion of -common experience that even within the method of:the noire], struck :me as being almost vulgar. Honestly,, I do not know heir great this book ia Or how lasting it Mill be I do know it is full of beauties and for the rest shook to be winnowed and winnowed. There is no living critic. capable of judging it It is a. book to be handed to the only infallible and honourable- critic there is Time, who (in time) deies not deeeive and cannot be bluffed. As one fumblingeritic, I shouldhe inclined to say that tam not wholly convinced, and I should hate to see :a_ philosopher, like Santayaaa shall we say, examine the bask Of -Mr. Morgan's

ideas about the relation betiveen the personal and essential reality. . There are after all such :things as sane • lunatica Also I should cap the quotation from lieets, on the Ce,..i•er, by another equally pertinent to the artist at his art :

• " What sea-bird o'er the sea

- Is a philosopher the While he goei Winging along where the wild water throes ? ".

Mr. Morgan is a zephyr beside Miss Evans's whirlwind.. She, too, deals with emotions affected by eternities, but it -is the en-Mt:ions she wants to project. She is so interested in them, in fact, that she writes of them with an acknowledged self- consciousness, indicated by such rude intrusions as " There are many I- know who by this time will have picked up this book and put it down again." Her-scene is a Welsh industrial town and her vision of it is coloured black and hell-flamed by awareness of souls gripped in awareness of sin, and damnation, and an angry God. They are so obsessed that nobOdy could 'attempt for a moment to -take the' book tis .photography : I should rather call it " a daemonic poem with some good passages." Dollbright who, rounds on Ifor Morriss the sinful minister, abandons his job because- his employer is licentious, -then, on finding his wife has cancer and must be operated on, begs it back, and Bellamy who faints at the sight of blood, but desires Menna with wild desire, and in possessing her finds that Dollbright has become suddenly charitable and humane— these exist already in literature as the daemonic 'figures of Dostoievsky, and I do not feel that Miss Evans has given them anything like his power to move us. Her style is illustrative of her flashes of genius, and her frequent frothy violence : "His face seemed to swoop on the edges of their industrious existences like a haggard meteor."

He lay on his side like an idle implement in a furrow."

"His teeth showed like hailstones in the storm of his mouth." "The sky was the colour of weighted snow and hung over the town like a cloth weighted with stones."

A final excerpt suggests Miss Evans's weakness ; she can write:

"The spiritual force behind his features was broken up like a star flying in fragments towardi its tremendous encounter with a smaller earth."

We should sense that—not be told it. (By the way, in our depression she utters a curious doctrine, "What are the dregs if not the essence of the whole ? " Did she ever make toffee ?) Miss Else Reed, in A Man Forbid, giiies us a fantastic story of midnight terror with much more restraint but also with much less suggestion of -genius trying to -escape. Her scene is a small Canadian seaport to'which a brigantine comes in the fog at night, with, among its crew, a gigantic negro. Gertrude, the child, with her second-sight, foreseeing disaster that she cannot entirely define, helps to create an eerie atmosphere, and Emma the_ erring.. servant girl, who comes under the malevolent influence of the negro, and pays dearly for her weakness, gives pathos and reality ; but Aunt Lucinda, the extremely proper old-young maid, the victim of secret com- plexes and inhibitioAs,_ _Li.: so unlikely. (in no matter what fantasy) to Inti7e. acted_ as she did that the book fades out whenever she appears. This is not to say that the atmosphere is not most skilfully built up, and had I been reviewing A Man Forbid -for --other -readers I might have been more eager to recommend it as quite good general entertainment.