FICTION.
SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE.
Precious Bane. By Mary Webb. (Cape. 7s. 61.) Precious Bane has many qualities which, though not pernicious in themselves, require careful handling, and when present in the work of the inexpert are very tiresome indeed. It is Biblical in style, lyrical in mood, and is written in an archaic dialect and in a tone of voice—the intonation of someone who, though brought up in it all his life, is for ever finding out fresh facts about the countryside. Unassimilated fragments of folklore ; curious customs culled from diverse centuries ; proverbs and wise saws made unfamiliar by local words ; attractive tit-bits from the antiquary's store—these are some of the features usually found in novels of this- class. They are to be found in Precious Bane ; but how transfigured, how reanimated, how refreshed I Mrs. Webb makes them an aid, not a bar, to the development of her theme. We do not ask ourselves whether the people of Shropshire about 1815 believed in wizards ; we only feel how awkward it was . for Mr. Beguildy that his wife scouted his pretensions to occult power. The office of sin-eater was a terrible one, but our chief concern is how it will affect the life of Gideon Sara, who thus piously took upon himself the burden of his father's misdeeds. In fact the story and the costume fit each other perfectly.
The excellence of-its love scenes alone Would make Precious Bane a memorable book. • They have a Meredithian quality in that they kindle anticipation and recollection : they are a secret thought, a secret longing, seldom indulged because the mere knowledge that they are there to be' called upon is pleasure enough. The language of love is at the command of most novelists ; but in how few do we feel, as we feel here, the quickening of being, the expectation of delight, the minutes flying, the whole unanalyzable process by which the various currents of consciousness lose their wearisome independence, unite, and flow to one object. " His voice made its own summer" : how evocative the phrase is, how it recaptures the breath of halcyon days, proclaiming at once the variety and the unmistakableness of love, setting it apart, the accompaniment of nothing, the end of everything. " Love is the peace to which all hearts do strive." Precious Bane is an amplification and an exposition of this fine saying. ,There was little of love in the relationship between Gideon and Jancis, only a rather muddy mixture of rival passions, ambition and obstinacy on his side, frailty and vanity on hers. Gideon would let nothing come to him, he must have everything his own way, stamped with the seal of his head- strong and acquisitive nature. The issue could -only be tragic, and Mrs. Webb makes us feel the tragedy, though she invests it with circumstances of horror and even of melodrama. But against this background of conflict and intricacy, of all the small but stubborn details of country life, ingrained 'characteristics, jealousies, prejudices, and superstitions, the love of Prudence for Woodseaves stands out as something dinfinitely gracious and flexible and single-hearted, like a 'single beautiful gesture in a ballet of ugly and contorted movements.
Half fiction, half fable, The Prisoner Who Sang is typical of the Scandinavian craving for romance. The hero, dis- satisfied at first with the limitations of his station (he was the son of a poor farmer), and afterwards more reasonably with the limitations of his personality, attempts to evade the -conditions of mortality by assuming various guiSes. As these transformations usually involve confiding people in the loss of money, he seems no better than a common swindler and the law treats him as such. Bojer, more sympathetic and penetrating than the law, makes us 'see that he is rather romantic than criminal, the victim of an uncensored cine- matographic imagination and an uncontrollable tendency to mimesis. The account of his ingenious frauds and impersona- tions . ,
tions is convincing enough to make the law-abiding citizen in us sigh with thankfulness when he is locked up ; but just as we are about to excuse him on pathological grounds we ltre Summoned to regard him as a symbol and invited to
identify ourselves. with him, a humiliating ,but wholesome experience. Andreas becomes an emblem of incapacity for life ; he cannot lend himself to the interests that life provides, if is irksome for him to be chained to one occupation or enclosed in "Oft -personality ; his thought's are so real to him that life is unreal. We are given this interpretation, and then Bojer, volatile as his" hero, returns to the realistic method and shows us Andreas in .the double rote Of pa*nbroker and Communist agitator, alternately bleeding"' the, people and urging them to cast off the yoke 'of the oppressor.. The unholy exhilaration proceeding from this double event is well conveyed, and then once more the moral is applied and the disturbing identification pressed home, this time by Andreas, on trial for making away with the pawnbroker. The Prisoner Who Sang. is in many ways a stimulating and delightful book, a human and subtle variation on the theme of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Emotionally it is keyed very high. Fundamental difficulties in thought and conduct seem to disappear or to lose their urgency in the tumult of feeling to which they themselves give rise. Their very violence provides them with a way out. How far the reader will be convinced by this mystical reconciliation of contradictions depends upon his temperament ; but Bojer's appeal to what we should like to believe is almost irresistible. The defect of the book is that, written as it were upon two distinct planes, it moves uneasily on each : a suspicion of insincerity lurks in the transitions from realism to allegory.
L. P. HARTLEY.
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