FICTION
By FORREST REID The Squire. By Enid Bagnold. (Heinemann. 8s. 6(1.) ' -
FOR several days I have been reading Miss Enid Bagnold's The Squire, taking it up, never -reading more than two or three chapters at a time, and it has been a curious experience. I appear to have been drawn, very close to the earth and to the beginning of things—to a life intensely primitive, animal, and mysterious: Yet what does- the book contain to create this effect ? It is about a woman—the Squire—who is looking
forward to the birth of her fifth child ; about children between the ages of four and ten ; about an old house somewhere in the country and not far from the sea ; about summer, a village, a garden, the smell of mould and grass and trees, sunlight and moonlight, nurses, servants, the children's conversation, their odd individual ways, leisure, peace, life in its fullest sense—deep and quiet as a river—but not the struggle or the din of cities—life nurtured, nourished, as it only can be for a few, rare at all times, and never rarer than today. A spell of enchantment is over it, rich and warm and brooding : sleep, waking, the voices of children, bird calls, the freshness of morning, the stillness of noon, the coolness of evening. The time is the present age of wireless and motor traffic and aeroplanes ; but they are silent here. The mother is forty-four, which is just the right age ; the father luckily is in India ; men are represented by a doctor and a butler ; a
gardener might have been added, but is not. We are in a world instinctive, fecund, protected by affection—a world in which body and spirit expand in happiness together, shiwly
accumulating strength and beauty.
I seem to be describing a poem, and I do not wish to alter this impression. It is the impression I received. The poem is not perfect: Caroline should not have been in it : nothing of that sort should have been in it. It is a poem spiritually akin to certain of Watts's pictures—the " Charity," the " Whence ?—Whither ? "—and the writing is in tune with the subject—simple, unadorned, yet possessing an imaginative richness of texture :
" They went together to the pond. The frogs, frozen by the movement* sat still. Fourteen golden eyes like nuggets gleamed unwinking from the margin. Some squatted on dead reeds and immersed branches. Tranced by the half-apprehended movement above them they relied for safety upon immobility. - Some -hung by one slim hand like children to a raft. All had been stricken to stone by the human appearance."
"She placed her hand on the garden gates to see that they were locked. A faint smell of horses was drifting on the night air, touched with manure and seaweed. The cold ivy on an archway rustled."
In its delicacy and precision it is poetry. And how -extra- ordinarily effective is that one simple little word " cold " in the last sentence. This is the kind of writing that really is writing, that lifts fiction on to a plane where it need not fear comparison with any other art. All the portraits in the book are good ; those of the children delightful. Take this of Boniface, aged seven : " He did not like to be disturbed. He liked to lie and think, lie and read, thumb a catalogue, a telephone directory, a dictionary. When he was disturbed (as he was disturbed all day long—to walk, clean his teeth, eat, go to bed), he would scream. Scream, and continue to read."
Miss Bagnold's talent is markedly subjective, Miss Somerville's is the very reverse—breezy, genial, downright—nevertheless with her, too, the personal note counts for much, and Sarah's Youth, though it is one of her slighter novels, is eminently characteristic. There is plenty of humour in it, plenty of hunting, and a lot about horses and dogs. It has charm and freshness, and a delightfully unsophisticated out-of-doors atmosphere typically Irish. Moreover, quite as much as The Squire, Sarah's Youth depicts a world undistorted by the night- mare of European crises. There are things in it which to my mind do not quite come off. Some of the escapades of the child Sarah seem to me improbable, and the psychic experiences of Kathleen, her half-sister, are treated too baldly, too artlessly if I may say so, to produce the effect aitned at. A sense of the Sarah's Youth. By E. QE. - Somerville and Martin Ross. (Longmans. 7s. 6(1.)
Garland of Bays. :By-Gwyn Janes. (Oollancz. los. 6d.) Lady Crushwell's Companion-. ,By .Bryan Guineas. (Putnam. 71. 6c1.) uncanny cannot be awakened by a mere statement, and Kathleen, I must confess, struck me as a failure. All the other characters, however, including the dogs and horses, live, while Tim Kavanagh, the blacksmith's boy, is among Miss Somerville's finest creations. He is introduced to us first at the age of seven, when his peculiar genius is already manifest. " He has the Green Finger, surely ! " somebody says, which in Tim's case means that he is beloved at sight by all creatures possessed of four legs and a tail. • There is some strange psychic quality behind this, too, no doubt ; but here Miss Somerville is quite at home, she understands and presents it so that it is perfectly convincing.
Tim works in the big stable-yard up at Castle Ower for Miss Mary Lorimer, who is Master of the Castle Ower Fox- hounds. Gradually his gift comes to be recognised, and he is called in, like a specialist, when any difficult case arises. It is partly this gift, and partly his simplicity, and partly his beauty, that attract Sarah to him. Of course, he is not of her class ; nevertheless, she falls in love with him, and her temperament being impetuous, the unfailing respect and reserve of his manner in the end exasperate her. It is a perfectly credible if unfor- tunate passion, for Miss Somerville has made Tim much the most attractive person in the book, while his natural modesty only increases his charm. It is Tim's ambition to become a vet, and it is not until he is setting out for Dublin, with this career in view, that he uneasily divines something of the true nature of Sarah's feeling for him. He is then twenty-two, Sarah eighteen. Miss Somerville's treatment of the situation is exactly right : she makes neither too much of it nor too little, and above all she keeps it on a plane of innocence. Sarah has two suitors of her own class, but they are not like Tim. And a vet, she reasons—after all, -wouldn't he be much the same as a doctor, any other professional man ?=why shoulci't Tim raise himself to her class, or very nearly ? If only he cared—but quite clearly he doesn't—not at least in that way. So we leave Sarah among her dogs and horses, determined never to get married at all. And it is a fitting ending to an open-air tale, refreshingly unsentimental.
The biographical novel, when its subject happens to be a writer of genius whose work I admire, is not a branch of fiction which particularly appeals to me. The external facts may be carefully presented, but the rest is bound to be guesswork ; and the rest, the private life, is what matters. Is is for this reason that I hope nobody is contemplating a novel about Edgar Poe, who hitherto marvellously has escaped. Of course, if he were given another name my objection would vanish. When Henry James, for instance, wrote a story about Coleridge, and called the hero of it Frank Saltram, all was well. One recognised an aspect of Coleridge, but one was not invited to accept Frank Saltram as the author of " Kubla Khan " and " Christabel." And naturally the greater the genius the less convincing must be the portrait. The hero of Mr. Gwyn Jones's Garland of Bays is only Robert Greene, but suppose it had been Shakespeare, who does actually—sleek and discreet— cross the stage. Even in Mr. Jones's Greene, though he is a less unpleasnt person than his Marlowe, I cannot find the spirit that inspired the lovely song, " Weep not my wanton, smile upon my knee, When thou art old there's grief enough forthee."
In a biography it would not matter, because the author does not profess to reproduce his hero's spiritual reactions, but in fiction it does. Still, this is a carefully written, carefully prepared book, and gives a detailed picture of the surroundings in which Greene lived and died—a loose impoverished life, a squalid death.
Mr. Bryan Guiness's Lady CrUshwell's Companion opens promisingly, but in its later stages the promise is not fulfilled. All that is going to happen to Ursula Prinn can now be foreseen, while the secondary plot, concerning the love affairs of Lady Crushwell's daughter Jasmine, is neither convincing nor particu- larly amusing. It seems to have been introduced for the sake of variety, Mr. Guiness perhaps feeling that Ursula's own love story, in its slightness and delicacy, needed some support. Unfortunately the support, inclining to padding, is of distinctly uneven quality.
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