FICTION •
OLD VIRTUES AND NEW SINS
The Clio. By L. H. Myers. (Putnam. is. 6d. net.) Cat's Cradle. By Maurice Baring. (Heinemann. 15s. net.) THE real identity of Mr. Arlen's and Mr. 'Aldous Huxley's heroines has been debated in the suburbs, the provinces and even in the West End and socially contiguous watering places these many months. Readers feel, though they may not admit, that such characters are " taken from life," which is equal to saying that they have merely the superficial qualities which clever persons observe in their fellows, and no more. They may well be what such people seem in real life ; but' it is not enough for a novelist to indicate idiosyncrasies. He must allow us to know what his characters actually area The characters in Mr. L. H. Myers new novel, The Clio,
are of the same bright hollow kind as attract those who like' Mr. Aldous Huxley's books for their topicality. A party of smart, pleasure-snatching men and women, many of them identifiable, go sailing up the Amazon, consciously experience. sensation, tire themselves and the reader with their worth- lessness. The widowed owner of the steam yacht ' Clio,' Lady Oswestry, is deeply concerned because of the running short of a particular face-cream :-
"Would Sir James marry her if her cheeks became rough and pimply ? Alas ! the imperfections to which love is blind are not as a rule thephysical ones. Nor did she make the mistake of imagining that Sir James prized beauty less for having reached the age to know that it was skin deep."
A great many small incidents occur as the ship makes her way up the river and bask again, but the people to whom they occur ape so futile that their adventures and amours
are- uninteresting and ridiculous. Mr. Myers deliberately ri•elates- one story and one incident which are bound to strike everyone' as shocking, and the book as a whole leaves one with-the' impression that he wrote it, not for pleasure or to amuse, not, because he thought it worth writing, but solely in ordei to expose the folly and nastiness of writing books like it.' His first novel, The Orissers, made so favourable and lasting an : impression, and contained 'at lenst two characters of such, disquieting permanence and beauty, that he can never have, composed The Clio seriously. It was time that someone should- expo- Se- the vulgarity of the current novels of intellectOal. high -Society with which we have lately been surfeited, for they, are much shoddier than the papei novelettes which entertain housemaids with tales of the velvet and limousines of countesses.
To turn from The Clio to Mr. Maurice Baring's Cat's Cradliis like" leaving a night-club where the habitués are trying I look more sophisticated and immoral than they have -the courage" to- be -foi- a welf-ordered countiy-house wheie inmates are sufficiently honest to admit that there do exist deitain standirds by which they judge their own conduct and that of their Meads. There is no cheap jangling cleverness in Cats Cradle ; it is serene, it convinces where The Clio disgusts. Its heroine, Blanche-Clifford, made a-mart-age de convenance while scarcely out Of the schoolroom, and bore -for many years the indignities which her husband, Prince Roccapalumba and his mother heaped upon her. It is not easy for any writer to make credible. the beauty, the distinction and the worth of a heroine he himself idealizes, but Mr. Baring does succeed. Not only her appearance, 1 something mom than the ordinary attributes of beauty—a fourth dimension of charm, mystery and wistful majesty " but •her character—with its restraint, its docility, conscien- tiousness and ardour—is gradually made familiar to the reader, from the inside outwards, not only at surface value. She is a real person, but of such a kind as Meredith's Diana, a sentient being whom we are a little richer for knowing, not real with the lying snapshot realism of the Mrs. Barlow in The Clio Who, though we hear that she had interviewed Lenin: has little enough being in the book and none whatever beyond the confines of the words that endow her with existence.
Mr. Baring's long, gracious novel has-other Merits besides tlutt of familiarizing us with a group of people worth meeting.
It is full of acute observations, and sound if not immensely penetrating psychology. This is all the more `"attractive because Cat's Cradle gives-an intimate picture of-life during the last quarter of the nineteenth and the opening of the present century. Sarah Bernhardt is a promising young actress, de Reske a tehofbeginiting to'be well spoken of :- " The band was playing a valse, 0 achoner Mar.' The siomen in their muslins and light clothes, some of them with lace veils on their heads, looked like elegant ghosts. The dancers made no noise as they danced on the lawn." - This picture of a yesterday so close to us, so different, so little known, is most romantic and endearing. 'Men and women did their duty in the station to which Providence had elected them with some grace 'then : they had their merit in keeping the conventions at some cost with heads held high. Or so Mr. Baring persuades 'us. It is rather sad to realize that so many novelists of a later generation almost convince us that to-day people are able to disregard 'con- ventions and to reject all standards of conduct, but that in doing so they also throw away not merely decency, which is only relative, but dignity, without which even freedom is worthless.
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