Best Stories of Walter de la Mare. (Faber. 8s. 6d.)
A Strange Storyteller
THESE lyrical and terrifying stories exact the compliment which the Angelic Stooge paid Blake : " Thy phantasy has imposed upon me, and thou oughtest to be ashamed." Yet their constricted world of unnerving houses, torrid Julys, of frightened and frightening children, odious men-servants, and old women who are " not quite all there," has a musical quality, as if water were flowing over it. In spite of his French name and reputation for being unplaceable, Mr. de la Mare writes in the rich and freakish manner of the Eng- lish Romantics, with luxuriant Elizabethan metaphor and sudden simplicities. He embroiders where Joyce and Tchekov would distil and suggest, and, unlike theirs, his still-life remains more vivid \than his portraits.
The sixteen stories chosen by their author and arranged without deference to chronology have a unity of their own. " Once when we were children, and in our own world, an hbur had been as capacious as the blue bowl of the sky and of as refreshing a milk. Now its successors haggardly snatched their way past our sluggard senses like thieves pursued." This regret from " The Vats " underlies much of Mr. de la Mare's writing, especially his unjaded and con- centrated feeling for objects, reminiscent sometimes of childhood, sometimes of Hopkins' note-books without their tightness and ten- sion. The properties which his characters trail after them are used, as in the Mediaeval Romances, to enforce the appropriate mystery and horror. So in "Missing," the ugliness of Mr. Sleet's self-pity, as he drones endlessly through a hot afternoon, depends almost as much on his mushy ice as on the complacent hints of violence to his plump paying-guest who "liked things select and comfortable." So the haunting " Seaton's Aunt " is set among slimy tadpole ponds, rat's poison, and gross and greasy food.
Sometimes " Missing" and " Seaton's Aunt " seem the most completely successful stories in the book, sometimes they are eclipsed by the delicate and painful child's world of " The Almond Tree," with its snow and colours, and the intolerable vigils when Nicholas and his Mother wait for his Father to come back from the enigmatic Miss Grey. " The beauty and solitude of the morning, the perfect whiteness of the snow—it was all an uncouth mockery against me—a subtle and quiet treachery." Both " The Almond Tree" and "The Ideal Craftsman" (1905) are early stories,. and they have been compared with Henry James—rather unconvincingly, since their evil and pain are of a kind accessible and familiar to
children as James's is not. De la Mare's plots cannot be crammed into a summary ; a boy raids a pantry at midnight, finds a hated
butler murdered and helps the murderer to mask it as suicide. It sounds like the Boy's Own Paper, but, in fact, could not well be more different.
Occasionally Mr. de la Mare seems too like the insistent Slakes and Bleets who button-hole him. He goes on too long, and treats
the reader like one of the minor characters in " Crewe," who was
" mighty slow in being explained to." There is pone of Tchekov's impatience which takes much for granted, and leaves the reader to supply his own back-cloth of moonlight or May-day. It is all painted in with meticulous pre-Raphaelite precision. Again, many of the characters have the strong family likeness which comes from recutring phantasy and self-knOwledge rather than observation. Arthur in " Miss Duveen " is a different version of Nicholas and "The Ideal Craftsman," and the elderly eccentrics are related in the same way Of course, this does not wreck the stories any more than some unrealistic dialogue does, but it means that they tend to cloy unless they are sipped like cherry brandy at rare intervals. " Crewe " would be a far more shattering story if one had not first
been inoculated with " Missing." PHOEBE POOL.
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