FICTION.
A RUSSIAN BARCHESTER.
THE stories in The Sentry showed that Nikolai Lyeskov could achieve considerable effects by the conjunction of brevity and horror. The Cathedral Folk is neither horrible nor brief ; it
appears at first to be a study of longevity, for, compared with many Russian villages, where the powers, both of nature
and of man, are arrayed against the continuance of human life, Mary Girod is a health-resort : the arch-priest TuberOzoff, the sub-priest Zakharaiya, and the sub-deacon Akhilla, seem assured of uninterrupted repose. The interruption, when it comes, is curiously un-Russian. The diabolus ex machina, Termosesoff, trailing his prince wriggling in the bonds of
blackmail, recalls many similar figures in Conrad, unbridled and irresponsible mischiefs let loose on a peaceful community to its bane. But here the instrument of destruction is not represented as the envoy of a malignant destiny ; it remains unjustified and unaccounted for, an accident and, from the standpoint of literary construction, an artifice. Indeed, the whole book, published originally in 1872, shows many minor devices of this kind—tricks to catch the attention and stimu- late suspense—which are foreign to a literature artistically
more sincere than ours. The Cathedral Folk certainly needs these adventitious aids, the outward signs of a coherence which has only a precarious existence apart from them.
Individual scenes are excellent, and the two chief characters are well sustained Tuber6zoff, the dignified, enlightened, implacable churchman, the friend of the poor and victim of a monstrous bureaucratic system, and Akhilla, with the inches of a giant and the intellect of a baby, uncouthly devoted to his superior. Unfortunately, in portraying Akhilla the emphasis is made to fall not, as would have been the case in Dostoievsky, on his simplicity but on his stupidity ; the accumulated instances of whieh carry immediate conviction, and afterwards prolonged boredom, a boredom only aggravated by the fact that Akhilla's infelicities of word and conduct are fatally implicated with humour, a quality that always suffers in translation.
The translation of The Cathedral Folk is not very happy. The dialogue has the effect of having been heard, ruminated over and digested and then put baek in the protagonists' mouths with all its flavour and life sucked out. Thus, in advising a friend not to lose his temper a man will say some- thing like " Pray do not yield to an access of wrath." And if, as is not impossible, this sally is greeted with general laughter, one does not know whether to look for its cause in the awkwardness of the idiom, or in some humorous suscepti- bility of the Russian mind. But, as always in Russian novels, the trivialities of life are least successfully rendered, and the author's power increases in direct proportion with the serious- ness of its subject. The death-scenes of Tuberezoff and Akhilla are not peculiarly memorable, do not compare with Bazarov's in Fathers and Children ; but how good they are, how free from false sentiment, how solemn. They carry on life, they even intensify character, to the very last, instead of losing themselves in a featureless lachrymose hush. It must be, one supposes, because the Russians attach so little import- ance to the fact of death that they are able to conceive it so variously, without being overawed by a sense of its importance or reducing it to a formula.
The continuity that was only discernible as a thread in The Cathedral Folk becomes a veritable hawser in The Gaol ; the story is imprisoned in its thesis much as its successive heroes, Jean Vialis and his son, are confined in the psycho- logical prison prepared for them by heredity. Heredity is always a thorny theme for the novelist to handle ; for directly the characters are finally deprived of free-will, automatically they cease to hold one's interest. Accordingly M. Bourget has to find a compromise which satisfies neither the scientific nor the fictional elements of the book. An hereditary predis- position to suicide dOes not work well in double harness with a series of disasters which might, of themselves, drive any sensitive person to take his own life. Each of the two motives impairs the validity *of the other. M. Bourget manages them very deftly, but he cannot reconcile them, and When he tries to increase the tension by whipping up one horse, the other goes lame. It is no use, for instance, to engage our sympathy by portraying the tortures of a Parisian husband who suspects his wife's fidelity—in any circumstances a Herculean task— and then, assuming the shape of Dr. Jekyll, declare that " psychological exudations don't liquefy as obviously as these of the bronchial tubes, still they -do liquefy and disappear, and we call the process consolation."
Of the two novels of American life, Free . Air, by Sinclair Lewis, and The Midlander, by Booth Tarking,ton, the first shows the Far West on holiday, the second the Middle West in sackcloth and in ashes. Free Air is very readable ; buoyant with vitality and high spirits ; it contains a motor-tour of two thousand miles, adventures, crashes, the whole of the earlier part presenting itself to the eye as an exciting film- picture. Later it becomes involved in the problem of a marriage between the daughter of a wealthy Brooklyn banker, and the motor mechanic who had been their good angel, in the perils of the motor-tour ; idealism and sentimentalism rep's& incident. Free Air is an early work of Mr. Sinclair Lewis, and has a spring-like quality of exuberance. Mr. Booth Tarkington's latest story has a jaded autumnal air. Diffuseness accounts for its inordinate length ; its texture is loosely woven and thin ; its characters have the stamp of familiarity. But it is sincere, and, better than many more pretentious books, it contrives to present the sad procession of the middle years, the disillusion of a fine nature bound to a trivial one, the expense of youthful spirit, and the tragedy of material success coming too late to be enjoyed, but not too
late to be lost. L. P. HARTLEY.
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