FICTION
By FORREST REID Flying Colours. By C. S. Forester. (Michael Joseph. 7s. 6d.) The Midas Touch. By Margaret Kennedy. (CasselL 85. 6d.)
THE stories reprinted now under the title of The Tales of Algernon Blackwood have been taken from the author's first three books, The Empty House, The Listener, and John Silence, and were written between loco and tom. "My interest in psychic matters," Mr. Blackwood says in an Introduction, "has always been the interest in questions of extended con- sciousness. If a ghost is seen, what is it interests me less than what sees it." We must accept this, though I should hardly have gathered it from the stories themselves. To take one of the principal seers, John Silence, there has been very little attempt to make him credible as a human being. He is an adept, possessing a vast knowledge of the occult, and mysterious powers by which he controls its manifestations—a purely roman- * figure in short—a kind of Sherlock Holmes who specialises in the uncanny. Actually what interests or thrills us in the stories is what happens in them, not the mind of John Silence, and almost always Mr. Blackwood's approach to the super- natural is through terror. This, in spite of the great variety in the experiences themselves, creates in the end a monotonous effect. Cold shivers down the spine, stirrings at the roots of the hair, become less infectious when repeated from tale to tale. After all, a sense of the supernatural need not be accompanied by fear ; it may be aroused in broad sunlight ; it may be no more than a suggestion of a deeper beauty, friendly and 1341evolent, existing -behind the beauty of- natural things. Such, at any rate, has been my own experience, and it was always a feeling unsought, a kind of expectancy, a state of mind far removed from dread.
• I am not for a moment seeking to cast a doubt on the genuine- ness of Mr. Blackwood's sensibility—" In each case," he tells us," an emotion of a very possessive kind produced each tale "- but I do feel that he has to some extent exploited this emotion, and that the so numerous variations rung upon it eventually induce a kind of numbness of the imagination equivalent to incredulity. To put it differently, though, as Mr. Blackwood says, we all may have "a core of superstition" in us, we' are not all superstitious in all directions. Yet Mr. Blackwood is, or seems to be. Probably the most convincing tales of terror ever written are those of Edgar Poe, but Poe rarely dealt with the supernatural. Even in Mr. Blackwood's own collection the two most shocking stories, A Private Secretary, and Max Henzig, are simply studies of disordered minds, while the two most successful, May Day Eve, and The Man from the Gods, have nothing to do with terror.
No doubt much depends on the susceptibility of the individual reader. Mr. Blackwood himself alludes to the horror of The Willows, whereas The Willows, for me, had no horror ; its invention was too apparent. Very likely it was a mistake to read straight through the entire volume. I became conscious' of prolixities and repetitions, of a marked unevenness of inspiration. Mr. Blackwood holds the view that "to cut, to alter is inadmissible," yet to my mind these 684 closely- printed pages would have gained, not suffered, by a rigorous pruning.
I am rather surprised to find that The Yearling has been a best-seller in America : I should not have expected it to be a best-seller anywhere. To begin with, the only female character of importance is the middle-aged, well-meaning, but fault- finding Ma Baxter : secondly, the hero is her son Jody, a boy of twelve : thirdly, from start to finish animals play at least as prominent a part in the novel as humans. The scene is Florida ; the people are poor and illiterate—struggling to make a living off the land, struggling against the encroachment of tropical forests and their inhabitants—bears, panthers, wolves. I definitely liked the book : indeed it would have been strange had I not done so, for Jody is very much my kind of boy, and I could check all his feelings by my own. Therefore I knew that they were neither falsified nor exag-' mated, though they might be unusual. It is the story of a friendship—on the boy's side demonstrative in its expression,
and passionate in its intensity. On the other side are grace, charm, beauty, affection ; but also something tricksy and elusive. Had the yearling been a dog, not a fawn, there would have been a truer reciprocity. The fawn is a day old when Jody finds him close to a slain doe, his mother ; and he is a young deer when, twelve months later, the story ends. The last scenes are painful, yet their crucIty is of a kind that could only have been inspired by pity. "It's life that goes back on you," says Jody's father, and the words appear to sum up admirably the teaching of Miss Rawlings' novel.
Obviously the author is a lover of animals' There is killing in the book, but it is done in self-defence or for food, not for sport, and there are many scenes of quite another nature— the scene of the old lonely wolf returning in the moonlight to play with the bulldog, the scene of the beautiful and fantastic dance of the cranes. Jody's father is fond of animals ; his mother emphatically is not. In the boy, however, the father's sympathy is intensiiRed, is far more emotional, so that Ma Baxter, had she known the word, would probably have called it morbid. "He did not believe he should ever again love anything, man or woman or his own child, as he had loved the yearling." On this note the tragedy ends, and, with his temperament, the prophecy may very easily prove true. Yet not a hint of sentimentality enters into Miss Rawlings' treat- ment of Jody or the beasts. She is here too sure of her ground. On the other hand, it does now and then weaken her present- ment of the father. The novel has little grace of style, but it has an original theme most sympathetically and under- standingly developed.
Sentiment of any kind is absent from Mr. .Forester's Flying Colours, which is a wholly different type of tale. It is an enjoyable yarn, and in my opinion would have been more enjoyable still had the author not introduced an erotic-.-episode that- seems highly -improbable... I .cannot. believe. Captain Homblower would have seduced the daughter-in-law of the man who shelters him and two of his crew in their flight from Napoleon's agents. Captain Hornblower was no saint, but I imagine he was a gentleman. For instance, to take a later episode, he might really have murdered the unfortunate pilot who falls- into his clutches had the pilot refused to obey instructions. But there is a difference ; inch an action would not have been against his code ; the double betrayal —for he is nor even in love—would. Nor does the incident help the plot ; it merely sows doubts and alienates sympathy. I admit that my view of Homblower is based on the present book alone ; there have been two earlier novels in which he figured, and those I have not read. Apart from this, however, the tale is a good one, and extremely well told. The night escape down the flooded Loire in a snowstorm ; the recapture of the Witch of Endor---these have the true ring of romance. The luck of the English sailors is of course phenomenal. Still, in the very conception of the latter_ exploit there was something fantasticalenough to have allayed suspicion ; while the recklessness of men, who even if taken had nothing to lose, would certainly have helped enormously.
Miss Kennedy's The Midas Touch, in spite of tragic develop- ments, is essentially a comedy of modem London life—of exploiters and the exploited.- With the exceptions of Tom Jekyll and his wife, the characters are a pretty worthless lot, and Tom only comes in towards the end. But they are presented with a liveliness that atones for much. Particularly good is the portrait of Mrs. Carter Blake, the professional clairvoyante. She is just as unscrupulous as the rest, yet somehow, in her good-natured vulgarity, this woman who drinks and lies and cheats is likeable. After all, her motives are not entirely selfish ; the primary one is to support her family, and above all to keep her unsuspecting and priggish son at Oxford. It is for this reason that she preys on her wealthy clients. Mrs. Carter Blake at any rate lives, and the fact that she is not wholly a fraud, but has gleams of genuine divination, makes her the more convincing. Her methods are deplorable, yet when she actually entices Corns Morgan, the steel magnate, into her web we rejoice, for here at leas-.
it is a Cale Of nit-Ee Meeting Greek. -
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