Fiction
BY L. A. G. STRONG.
BR, DAVID GARNETT'S progress to the front rank of con- temporary letters has been sure and deliberate. He began with a tour de force, which attracted immediate and prolonged attention. Following it with a second, he proceeded to prove, in a series of short. and careful stories, issued at infrequent intervals, that he did not depend upon a bizarre choice of subject, but that his originality was of the truer kind, a quality of vision and observation indispensable to genius. Even so, there were some who found, in the very eare and scarcity of the writing, a hint of danger. Genius in the young novelist, they said, is not usually an infinite capacity for taking pains. Mr. Garnett seemed to these critics too coolly in control, his characters too firmly kept to heel, his writing unhurried by creative urgency. They admitted the excellence with which he treated his subjects, but doubted whether his genius was one to be occupied with weightier matter. They doubted his power to let himself go. Then The Grasshoppers crime to prove that Mr. Garnett knew his own business best ; a book with every appearance of having been written at white heat, and showing no loss of exactness in the writing. Now at last we have a major work, the final evidence that Mr. Garnett has been sharpening his weapons, and that his development has been the deliberate development of an artist who knows from the start, either consciously or by instinct, what he is about.
A recent historian, Captain Yardley, writing of the founding of Virginia, opined that the colonists would have been saved a deal of trouble if Powhatan and Opachancanough had been hanged out of hand. Had this happened we should not have had Mr. Garnett's novel, for Pocahontas would never have come to England. Mr. Garnett has set himself to tell her story, as precisely as it is known.
t` My ambition has been two-fold t to draw an accurate historical picture and to make it a work of art, and I am well aware that tIlleee8.9 would have been easier and more complete if my aims had been different from what they were.".
It is enough to say that he has succeeded. Vividly and soberly, in a prose perfectly subdued to its purpose, he traces her career. We see her as a small child, then as the creature of dawning instinct who claimed Smith for her own : growing wiser in love, and realizing the true nature of his regard for her: believing him dead: betrayed by Japazaws and held' prisoner : married to John Rolfe : brought at last to the England she had longed to see.
"The sun blazed hot in a sky stippled with thin, high maqueret clouds and white hair-streaks wiped across the steel plate of blue. Below, the circle of the sea's blueness was intense and wherever a wave-top lopped over in accidental foam, it made a rainbow shadow of bronze, almost of red, and these, half seen out of the tail of the eve, might' have been the vanishing limbs of tawny sea,people. Pocahontas could not believe the sea empty : it was too large a. world not to be ruled by men, and a red-skinned race must fleet.' through its depths after the cod, and aim their arrows at the flying. fish and leaping dolphins, just as their fellows on land ran through the green forests after the deer, and shot down the flying deck and turkey."
liar story is the brightly coloured thread running through the history of the colonists' early struggles against disease, the Indians, against their own ignorance, and- the jealousies. and factions that divided them. "Facts," Mr. Garnett says,' begin by inspiring the imagination ; they end by imprisoning it in a strait waistcoat. . . ." They do, indeed ; and nowhere so tightly as when a novelist is dealing with character. He knows too well, and in the wrong sort of way, what his characters did. What they thought he has to infer: for himself, and, what is far harder, to present the characters tout in such a manner as to reconcile and make sense of all their reported actions. In this department of his novel only,. Mr. Garnett shows the strain. True, portraiture as such has never been- his forte. His novels are memorable for incident rather than for character. Even so, in Pocahontas it is plethora of material that has made his task so hard. Such a' figure as Smith is easy game for the novelist who may select what hc likes, and leave out all that is troublesome to explain. Mr. Garnett, facing the facts, has brought off a notable success, nowhere more splendidly than in the scene where Smith, his men surrounded' abd outnumbered, suddenly loses all fear and overcomes Opachancanough by the sheer ecstasy of his courage. With Pocahontas herself he has achieved a triumph. Far more space than is here at our disposal wand be spent in praising this fine book, and in enumerating its excellences : the terrible scenes of massacre, the injury and departure of Smith, the passages between him and Pocahontas, the torture of the young Monacan brave, Pocahontas' arrival in London, and many others. We must content ourselves with saying that Mr. Garnett has achieved the success of his career, producing a history which is also a disciplined work of art.
Puppets Parade, as its title suggests, is another matter. It is an unpretentious and exceedingly readable story of stage life, excellently fulfilling its primary purpose, which. is to entertain. As regards plot, Miss Leslie writes to formula. We seem to have heard before of the man who marries one woman without appreciating that he is in love with another. We seem to have known other progresses towards the Divorce Court arrested by the timely death of a little child, which throws the heroine back into the arms of her husband and respectability. The husband in this case is a War-wreck named Thornton. The man who marries foolishly is Martin Pod-Trench, dramatist. The lady is Carol Voysey. Carol and Martin, conveniently kept apart by their respective loveless marriages, as conveniently meet again and reaffirm their passion. Carol goes back to the stage and turns one of Martin's plays from a failure into a success. Miss Leslie's theatre scenes are most pleasantly done, and obviously from a first-hand appreciation of their difficulties and humour. These scenes, with Mrs. Fetch the landlady, and Miss Ryan, who ran the Radchester Repertory Company, are the most successful things in an enjoyable and sufficiently credible story. Indeed, Thornton and Monica, Martin's wife, are the only characters to whom Miss Leslie's title may literally be applied.
Mr. Frank Swinnerton recently observed that the essential novelist seldom had what Bloomsbury would call a first-class mind. In other words, he is not "clever." Cleverness as such is one of the curses of the contemporary novel. It must seem both churlish and discouraging to tell the author of an unusually promising first novel that he has gone the wrong way about it, and in any case it is probably presumptuous, for we dc; not know what his maturer technique will be. Still, it is fair to say of Laura Seaborne that there is not in it that fusion of cleverness with narrative purpose which alone can make- a novel of its kind a work of art. The cleverness sticks out, and gets in the way of the narrative. What exactly is meant by "The boundary between what is actual in life and what is possible was one which encircled Laura instead of passing through her " ; or Nowadays when Lady Seaborne went into society she looked like somebody who is waiting for the audience to stop talking and for the play to begin. The audience had become actors and she had become the sole member of an audience " Y These things seem to me a pity, because Mr. Hall has a grasp of his theme, and there is about the best of his writing a peculiar quality, blended of insight and external observation, which marks him out as a writer of real promise. • . Lucy Cotter had an unusually beautiful elder sister. No one could feel indifferently about Pamela, and Lucy belonged as ardently to her faction as did any of her admirers. She acted as her confidante and errand. girl, and shielded her from the Puritanic rages of her New England home. Lucy, who had no confidence whatever in her own beauty or power to attract men, knew only in her simplicity that men attracted her. Pamela went to New York, and Lucy ran away to join her, only to be recaptured by her father and sent to a boarding school. Later on, at college, she met Danny, one of Pamela's early admirers. After a short, idyllic happiness with him she suffered four struggling years in New York, taking any man who seemed to have what she was seeking. In the end, Danny came back. Second Sister is amoral, straightforward, fresh, sincere, and perceptive,
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