A. BOOK OF THE MOMENT

THE TEXTURE OF YOUTH

The Madonna of the Barricades. By J. St. Loe Strachey. (Jonathan Cape. 7s. 6d.).

It is one of the least kind ironies of life that the states of mind and body which bring most delight come earliest, and, therefore, pass with half their delightfulness unappreciated because of their subject's lack of less pleasant experience as a basis for comparison. The beauty of twenty, who finds that she arouses the interest of all beholders and that that interest immediately becomes a desire to cherish her, enjoys her state but takes it for granted, having known no other. How immeasurably greater would be her joy in it had she previously known what it is to be a neglected spinster in the fifties or a fatigued mother of a large and selfish family ! And the perfett hour flies by the male just as elusively. I remember some years ago at Walmer seeing Burgess going about the town shortly after he had swum the Channel, a feat which most of us would rather perform than write another Hamlet, so glorious is the dream it offers that man might conquer the universe by sheer vitality, by simple force and fortitude, without resort to the feeble human subterfuge of the intellect. There was to be seen on the face of Burgess a great deal of jollity and honest satisfaction with his achievement, but nothing like the ecstasy which one would suppose to be given by the possession, of such strength and physical harmony. But it occurred to one then that he was just the one person in Walmer or the world who could not be aware of his bodily good luck. It was a condition as familiar to him as the air he breathed. He would never prize it till, with age, he lost it. More than that, not till then would he even become aware of it, any more than the more o-dinary of us arc aware of the negative blessing of freedom from pain which appears positive enough to the patient suffering from advanced cancer.

This irony of life accounts for one of the most notable paradoxes of literature : that youth cannot write about youth, and that those who are past their youth can. During the last few years there have arisen, Heaven kalows, a sufficient number of writers who are professionally young, who are enamoured of youth, who think of life as one long declension from the bright period of the bib. There is, for example, Mr. Alec Waugh, whose books are obsessed by immaturity, whose every novel is a lament that life cannot always be lived on the school playing fields„ who packs, his pages with a record of the dilemmas that face the young ; but who is always eluded by the spirit of youth. The people in The Lonely Unicorn or Kept are faced with conditions that would not have presented themselies to anybody out of their twenties, but they themselves are . not essentially different in their spiritual state from middle-aged people of the same class. How should one who has drunk nothing but water describe the qualities that differentiate water from wine ? But here is Mr. St. Loe Strachey coming forward with his first novel at the end of a long editorial career, and having drunk of the water of youth and the wine of maturity proceeds to point out those qualities most justly and aptly. This is a thoroughly old-fashioned, even out-moded novel ; it is defiantly behaviourist in its method ; it will not have a thing to say to the modern fashion of psychological analysis ; it has within it a good deal of stuff that in most literary households has been relegated to the lumber-room-=a heroine's vow of celibacy, very suitable for rendering in a steel engraving, an adventitious death in a convent. Only, it has captured exquisitely the spirit of youth. There happen to be' within its pages two young lovers, the Honourable GeOrge Chertsey and the Comtessa Carlotta, who are really young, whose love has the authentic quality of young love. In them you get it all : in the Honourable George, nice son of a colleague of Lord Melbourne, heir to a country seat in the NCIV Forest and a super-seemly town house in Grosvenor Street, who never- theless rushes over to Paris to fight at the barricades of the '48 beside his wildly revolutionary Italian lady-love, one gets as pretty an exhibition of that high passion for patting strange dogs which brings exaltation to the youth of all those whose maturity is to be noble. And in the Comtessa Carlotta, whose impassioned membership of the Carbonari brings all

these excitements about one gets as Etiwily rendered the

lovely priggishness of youth is pedantry wit apple blossom texture to it, the flighty solemnity, That is a delicious phase to write about, when the nearly infant hand picks up the instruments forged by the race and without conscious vanity declares that it is now going to use them to resolve all dis- harmonies of human life ; when it picks up, say, the power to make political changes as if it were a key and cries boastfully,

" This key will unlock all the doors in 'our house ! It will unlock all the doors in Granny's house, too ! It will unlock all the doors in this town ! It will unlock all the doors in the world ! " And the love between these two is com- pounded of all these absurdities and others as spring-like and endearing. When the young things spend a night together on a mattress in an alcove by the barricade they spend it innocently in bookishly expressed discussions of sexual ethics, which is entirely consistent with the unjaded ecstasy of young love, which hardly requires physical curses to heighten its intensity. Even So nowadays do the original and ardent talk on Mrs. Stopes.

The main interest of The Madonna of the Barricades will for most of us be this reconstruction of youth in the persons of the Honourable George and the Comtessa Carlotta. But there is also an engaging reconstruction of one of the most attractive periods of English history, of the best volumes of Punch. "My father " is a great character.

" If I wanted to give a rough sketch of, or nuanoria technica in regard to my Father, I should tell people to think of him as a kind of very good copy,' or even replica, of Lord Melbourne. Ho had not all Lord Melbourne's wit, nor all his charm, nor perhaps all his intellect ; but he had, like the Queen's first Prime Minister, a most attractive mixture of freedom and fastidiousness, joined to an intense condemnation of fogeydom. The vulgar assertion of privilege and of any touch of pretentiousness or pomposity in politics affected him like a rancid taste in food. He honestly believed in popular rights in the abstract ; and in theory genuinely abhorred and detested the aristocratic point of view. Indeed, you might almost say that in the abstract both Melbourne and my Father despised Aristocracy. Melbourne, as you kmiw, boasted that he did not know that his father had been a country attorney. My Father, indeed, was, I think, a little wistful that he could make no such boast, and use it as a way for putting down ducal and other pretences to hereditary magnificence . . . "

He also in his day had had the passion for patting strange dogs ; had been with Byron at Pisa, and was confident enough in his own stock to encourage the same passion in his son at the right time and give him letters of introduction to notabilities in Paris which are exquisitely of the period : that, for instance, to the great Baron Rothschild :-

" It was a model for that kind of letter, and also a model, though I

was a little bit ashamed of it, of the perfectly polite and well-bred way which an Englishman of position in those days thought it right to assume towards a Jew millionaire of whom ho had no need to borrow."

And the portrait is just such as might be drawn by a loving and respectful son ; there is the true slight superficial filial shyness, the true fundamental confidence

:- "Here my Father made a little mock bow, the exact intent of which I did not ask, or want to ask, though I saw it was not satiric or malicious. My Father was essentially a Romantic and loved to see things hapPen in a spirited and picturesque way . . . "

Yes, the behaviourist method can convey all this. It co show us the Honourable George in the Row in the Spring Qf '48, making the Carbonari sign to the dark, stiff Prince Napoleon as he rode with Mrs. 'Toward, the courtesan who for love of him gave her fortune to his attempts to get back the Imperial throne, though she knew that their success would mean her loss of him

" She rides in the Park on a prancing grey, She and her squires together,

Her dark locks gleam from a bonnet of grey, And toss with the tossing feather."

It can show ns Marx, in a fury because the English police -had not protected him from messengers of the Carbonari just when he was particularly busy composing a manifesto to the peoples of Europe urging them to rise against the capitalist—" it is cruel, it is wicked, and I shall apply to Scotland Yard and see if I cannot shame them into doing their 'duty "—and being quieted down by Engels, who was one of those sweet and unfortunate souls who are born to be " dear Watson." It can show us the divine windbag Lamarthr at one of •the most difficult moments of demagogy, when "his mind . . . was being stretched on the rack by some of . thopc: deSperate- nth:Wails; which must always_hurt_the dew gogue at moments of crisis. "-Where am I ? What am I really doing ? What does all this mean ? Where will it end and where shall I end ? Once mere my words have hid an. indirect effect of which I had never. dreanif and one which will, give me time. But is time really of any good to • me ? Can I use it ? " The whole scene • is a curious parallel to Mr. Sludge, the MediuM,. in its picture" of a -liuman being alternatively exalted • arid degraded above the normal by abandonment to a proCess that is striped in varying proportions with authenticity and fraudulence. . 7 Behaviourism can do more than this„00. It conveys in one of the earlier chapters a purely aesthetic einotiOn, unrecom mended by historical interest, of a very high order. The passage which described how the young oarsmen row up the backwater and under the watergate and find themselves on_ a lake with shores and ari island romantically built upon and peopled has a real magic quality for all its blandly cir- cumstantial manner. But it has, of course, its limitations; One perceives that when one reflects upon the plainly factitious illness and death of the Comtessa Carlotta and wonders why such unnatural perishings are 'so usual in novels of this old- fashioned type. Is it not that if one portrays a character through any but the shortest phase of life that character is bound to change, that the reader will be certain to ask for the cause and exact mechanism of these changes, and that only the author who bas used the psychological method of exhibiting his 'characters can really answer the question ? The supreme behaviourist novel, Tom Jones, deals only with the youth of its 'hero. Had it shown' him growing middle-aged the reader might have been tempted to ask, " But why did he becOnie middle-aged in this partiCular way ? " and it might nothave been so easy to convey the answer simply by reference to the material manifestations of his being. The insolently great writer merely closes the book. The lesser 'writer tries to Burke the question altogether by preventing the character from changing by killing it off. Decidedly the modern psy- chological method has its advantages. Thit The Madonna of the Barricades, with its fresh and graceful reconstruction of past things, shows what advantages, particularly in the creation of objective things, can belong to the old method when used by a distinguished mind.