A Tale of Babylon
The Uncelestial City. By Humbert Wolfe. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) Tim fact that Mr. Humbert Wolfe arouses both aversions and enthusiasms shows that at least there is something in his work which demands attention. His former books have not always attracted us, for we felt that both content and expression have often found popularity by a too facile pre- sentment of conventional sentiment and taste. There was so much glibly elaborate reference to the stock poetic situations : moonlight on fountains and roses ; shawls and shoulders in summer gardens ; "the wailful sweetness of the violin." It was all so reminiscent of the waltzes of Waldteufel and Gungl.
In The Uncelestial City, however, Mr. Wolfe shows a deeper self ; a self that has learned a greater honesty of inward con- templation; a self made doubly sensitive by some recent wound that has startled him into a new consciousness of suffering. The old technique is still there, but now we have to accept it because of what it conveys, and also because with its stronger purpose it has had to purge itself of much of its theatrical trimmings.
This lyrical story has been built up with deliberate care, so that as a narrative it succeeds, under an appearance of casual disregard of continuity in telling a complicated tale ; of pre- senting a thousand and one individuals typical of town life: and also in showing the development and gradual callousing of character in the chief figure of the poem. This figure is a lawyer, and we see him first as an undergraduate at Oxford ; next in process of choosing a profession ; as a young barrister ; as a K.C. ; and finally as a judge in the Criminal Court who has condemned a man to death for a crime passionel. The condemnation wakes the judge to a sense of metaphysical reality, and in meeting the condemned man's mother he meets also his alarmed conscience, which summons him to a heart- breaking survey of his life—and of all human life.
Incidental to this main theme is the story of the judge's daughter, whom he worships. She has got into the hands of an ex-Guards Officer spiritualist, whose name has been asso- ciated with the circumstances of two unhealthy suicides. We
see the father's suffering by his conversations with an old college chum, who remains his confidant to the end :— " But Peter, after all the girl is mine,
I can't look on the various things that trouble 'em as something that a thinker might define as characteristics of the social problem.
You can fool life perhaps at twenty-one, at twenty-five still treat it as a topic, but after that the farce will lose its fun, and, whether you rthe it or not, become an epic.
Thersites still may talk through the edge of his teeth in studios, and Helen ogle her Paris, but both of them are listening underneath their breath to a great footstep that never hurries.
Some day a careless hand will crash the chin of the poor jester, and leave him a dead boy ; some night the torches will blaze upon her sin, . and burn her beauty with all tho tale of Troy."
It will be seen from this quotation that in technique Mr. Wolfe owes much to Browning and considerably to Byron. ,The likeness is deeper, as one may suspect, since an artist's technique—like a woman's clothes—is a revelation of the person within. Mr. Wolfe has in common with his two great monitors an ama7ing dexterity of mind, a quick social intelli- gence, an insight into the sophisticated world and its ways, and a cruelly incisive wit that expresses itself sometimes in honeyed or vitriolic satire, according to his conception of the veniality of the person or deed that has roused his indignation.
Thinking over the poem afterwards, one feels that the most conspicuous mood of its presentment is one of compassionate satire, an unusual combination of gentleness and tolerance with ruthless condemnation of the smug, the self-righteous, and the hypocrites. We may quote, therefore, a passage which might be taken as an argument, or synopsis, of the book:
"Here let me pause to indicate that this, so far from preaching hate or atheism, is a plea for universal charity.
Nor is it anti-Christian to argue passionately that man cannot be said to ratify the Treaty of Mount Sinai
until he takes into account the Sermon on the other Mount. Moreover, although satire scoff, it demands no less • What will it profit a man to win the world, who loses his soul ? 'because the poet chooses thus to apply to knave and fool the clinging leech of ridicule."
On this theme, and by this method, the rich embroidery hangs : vivid character study ; caricature ; burlesque ; scenes romantic and sordid ; soliloquy and drama. The various pattern is knit together by the presence of the poet himself, in his old guise of a fiddler, whose instrument is the human heart, and whose notation is the beauty and distress of mortal history running against the calm ground-bass of nature.
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