FICTION.
THE HIGHBROWS.*
TEMPEBANNNTAL jockeys, when riding their horses for a " place" only in a Selling Plate, have sometimes been so intoxicated by their own simulated eagerness as to win the race, willy-nilly. Does this explain Mr. Joad ? He sets out—or in the Foreword guardedly hints that he sets out—to parody the modern novel : he remains to write one. He accumulates—consciously, he would impress on us—all the weakest characteristics of the modern form : he adopts a verbal style singularly unpleasing he banishes Plot : shows a natural distaste for idealization : confines sentiment to a single chapter specially set' apart for that purpose : he scatters his pages with epigrams and witticisms in the beat Union manner ; in short, he attempts to reduce the modern form to that state in which it may be most ineffective, most of a bore. But the Pure Bore is the one subject which cannot be amusingly parodied at any length : boredom is the one quality in a composition which exaggeration of method unfail- ingly intensifies. Some extraneous leavening is necessary, and Mr. Joad attempts to counter this difficulty with an impoesibility. He attempts to write parody and direct satire at the same time : to use a form which he does not take seriously to express views which he evidently does : he rides his hobby- horses to win. The only sort of satire which can find a place in parody is the ironical ; but this satire is not ironical, it is perfectly direct, and it is inevitable that both the satire and the parody should weaken each other : if the' matter is to be effec- tive, it is unsafe to make the manner too ridiculous. Indeed, if one were to compare The Highbrows with some other Oxford novel—say, Mr. Beverley Nicholls' Patchwork—it is the latter one would presume to he the parody : Mr. Joad's style and hero are less ridiculous, his epigrams are good ones, and he has not gone through the University with his eyes blind or wilfully shut ; indeed, he gives as good a picture of present undergraduate life and thought as Mr. Nicholls' is laughably fictitious.
So much, then, for the parody : it cannot be said to be particularly effective as such. But the satire is a very different matter. The book is a sort of Natural History of Bgtes Noires: each chapter quite disjointed, and an attack on some separate obnoxious way of thinking. In the first, " Dabbling in the Slums," it is the Muscular Christian who comes in for some particularly effective and damning analysis. To the general reader this may appear a little unnecessary, but to the University reader it will be extremely welcome, for though the influence of these religious hearties has been materially weakened by the removal of one of their apostles to a distant bishopric, they still constitute something. of a University eyesore. Mr. Joad turns his searchlight not so much on their activities in the University itself—the S.C.U. and kindred organizations.—as on their propensi- ties for slumming. He sets his hero (who is a far more natural and likeable young man than Mr. Joad the parodist would probably be willing to admit) first in the summer camp of a college boys' club, then in the East-end settlement of " Uni- versity Hall " itself. The way in which that hero makes both these institutions too hot for himself by practising exactly what they preach is a pretty serious indictment of the principles upon which such institutions are run. Yet• it is a just test, and one to be recommended without reserve.
In the second chapter, " A Glimpse of Bohemia," the scene is with some Not,. on his rothen Gesso. By R. Gordon Bee. London.: Walker's- • The Highbrows: a Modern Nowt By C. E. M. Joad. London : JOnathau transferred to Brittany, the subject to the hero's naïve attempts to gain some practical experience on the question of sex, an attempt which is perpetually foiled by the truth of the axiom that when woman woos, man flees. However willing Pramp may be in theory, in practice it is Mme. Barna's very willingness which is his perpetual stumbling-block : as a study in the psychology of the normal, that almost untrodden field, it is both interesting and amusing ; but if its frankness should shock any reader, the present writer hopes that he at least will not be blamed ; and hereby gives warning. That this chapter shoal be followed by one exploiting the more matrimonial aspects of North Oxford—for North Oxford also is made too hot for Arthur Pramp—is itself a delightful piece of irony ; and there is no falling off in Mr. Joad's powers of truthful description from the undergraduate's point of view either in this " Idyll " or in his subsequent attack on the Fabian Society—an attack in which he shows the " Mivian " to be a very similar sort of half-way hypocritical animal (except that he is neither muscular nor Christian) as the bgte Noire of Chapter I. Pramp finally makes the summer school too hot for him by legally marrying one of its members. The rest of the book divides its dislike between the 1917 Club (?) and the last generation, and it is characteristic of Mr. Joad that the final flicker of enlightenment should shine in the latter. Indeed, it is an enlightened harangue of several pages from Mr. Pramp, senior, to the assembled family that ends the book, and if the reader finds the attack on the family less interesting than the earlier vitriol, it is not because that vitriol has lost its savour, but because the attack has been more often done before.
Mr. Joad asks us to call his novel immature : we shall be ready to concede him this, but with the rider that when he has found a form that he can take seriously we shall expect him to produce very shrewd work indeed.
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