FICTION

MATTER AND MANNER

sia HARRY JouNsrores novel Relations is delightful. The distinguished author, in thoroughly familiarizing us with the fortunes of two large families over a period of the last twenty-

dye years, plunges roundly to work with the marriage of

Rupert Cuthbertson and Lady Adeliza Parkyns in Australia, Where the groom has been busy making a fortune and the

bride has been staying at Government House with her father, the Earl of Tipperary. The pair are absurdly in love, and back in England, like the good-natured things they are, they lose no time in visiting each other's numerous relatives, the clerical Cuthbertsons and the temperamental Irish Parkyns. When the story ends in 1925 the reader knows as intimately as though lie too had married into the families all the tribulations, foibles,

and successes of all their collaterals and connexions by Marriage, without ever having lost interest in the two central and easily the most likeable characters, Rupert and Adeliza,

of whose generosity and kindliness the others have so well taken advantage.

By letting the reader into his confidence, Sir Harry Johnston has kept interest as lively as though in his chatty, man-of-the- world's way (like some widely-experienced elderly clubman with a good eye for the essentials and a facile tongue) he had gossiped to someone much younger about celebrities. This confidential, reminiscential manner, of course, makes most of

the reported conversations very stilted, but it also gives a Most lively glimpse of life in Governmental circles and mining

camps in Australia, of South Africa during the Boer War, of

Parliament ten years ago. And no one could call the author a pessimist. Even the most iinamiable of the Cuthbertsons and

Parkyns benefit extremely by the War, even the " dolourous wife " of a-very high-church curate who

" having survived about five deadly diseases in twenty years, was so cured by the misery she had dealt with as a hospital nurse that she entered into something like enjoyment of restored life."

No illusions are maintained about British politicians, who are neatly and often very naughtily caricatured. There is, for instance, the Duke of Merioneth, aspirant for the Premiership, who in his youth

" took . . . the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. I think the subject given was ' Happiness and his poem went to-show how unaffectedly happy you might be if you had an assured income of twenty thousand a year ;

and the Parliamentary Under Secretary who

" had amassed a wonderful collection of beetles. I say this without an approach to a sneer. . . . He laid down the law about Badminton, a law which was never afterwards infringed, till the game became extinct . . . "

But, by contrast, there is great implicit faith in British

politics, and many sound hints as to the future of the Empire : indeed Relations might be called an Empire novel, for with all the Parkyns in the foreground Australia, South Africa and the Colonial office are never out of the picture. The feeding bottles

of the second generation, Regent's Park, the fleas in Dublin hotels, are there, too ; in fact not even the youngest of our young writers could be more blunt than Sir Harry Johnston is when he thinks fit ; and when he speaks of fleas, kitchen stoves and obstetrics it is with every bit as much dry humour and point as when he snaps out a sketch of a Member of Parliament. These are the small joys of a most readable, broad, and agree- ably prosy sketch of our ruling classes.

So artless and so rough is Sir Harry Johnston, though so very

effective, that to turn to Mrs. Mary Borden's Jericho Sands is to be conscious of turning from the older school of novelists who told a good, meaty story with quantities of characters and incident and told it no matter how, but in the end well, to the new school who consider how they will tell their story, in what calculated phrases, before they come to think of the weight of the narrative itself. Where in Relations a marital mishap comes all apiece with the rest, in Jericho Sands it is the very centre and raison d'itre of the book. The heroine, beautiful and gallant Priscilla " with her head up and her back to the wall, keeping her mouth shut "

and her husband Simon, a baronet in holy orders

"too obsessed by the formula of Christian doctrine to understanot what was the matter with him, getting into an awful muddle between his jealousy and his religious fervour . . . "

by their disastrous marriage also unite two large landowning families, good people all, plucky and conscientious. Miss( Borden tells their story remarkably well, even brilliantly, lavishes all her picturesque talent and verbal felicity on eveni the minor characters. Indeed, it seems a pity that she should; have chosen to keep Simon and Priscilla so much to the fore when their relatives are so much more interesting. Priscilla goes down before a post-maritil love-romance, sincere and!

overwhelming as it is, too effortlessly and completely, we have been expecting her infidelity too long, for it to be wholly successful in fiction. Her lover is too meagerly exhibited, and her husband too obviously intolerable for the elopement to have prime dramatic value. We would rather have heard more of Priscilla's mother, Lady Agatha, about whom

`-` there was a preposterous frumpiness . a gentle, weather-beaten,

dilapidated scarecrow quality that in the daughter of that old worldling the Duke of Dorset was most comically pleasant. . . . She would stop her pony-cart at the sight of a tramp or a ploughman, would lean over the side beckoning, and with her sallow, flaccid, chinless face breaking into a heavenly smile would say, My friend, here is a beautiful message from Jesus Christ your Saviour.' " and the Marquis of Moone,, yivid when described as being like all the Moones, " high, bland, noble walrus " who when in company was so shy " that he simply did not hear what people said to him and was; quite unaware of being rude when he did not answer."

But if Mrs. Borden writes so well that we begrudge the

ultimate paucity of the tale she tells, what can be said of Mr., L. P. Hartley, who writes with a clean simplicity which comes only from the utmost devotion of a fine literary talent to the creation of style so pure that one is almost unaware of its naturalness, restraint and ease ? Simonetta Perkins, in one, hundred and fifty pages, between a more than customarily sound binding, at the price of an ordinary novel, relates how an

American woman in Venice did not have a love affair with a gondolier. For models and precedents Mr. Hartley has, of course, Mr. James Joyce, who with unspeakable talent and

inordinate vanity wrote a book twenty times as large about very little more, and Miss Dorothy Richardson, whose many novels are all about nothi g at all happening to an uninteresting person called Miriam : both being works of great and less great merit, considered purely as writing rather than as fiction. But

the average reader expects a story. What by common consent

are known as " best " novels—Don Quixote, Tom Jones,. Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House, The Brothers Karamzov, War and Peace and Robinson Crusoe—are full of happenings, whether it be windmill-tilts, the muddying of Miss Bennet's stockings or the burning of Moscow. Fine writing alone is very good, but it is probably at its best in the writer's study where in secret he develops his technique. Also, memorable writers give the,

impression that they care intensely what befalls the characters in their books, while Mr. Hartley is so coldly correct towards his unmarried' American lady that one cannot- but conclude that even he does not care particularly whether she be indis- creet or no : perhaps he realized that the midnight oil has got

a little into her works, the very_best midnight oil though it undeniably is.