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Novels and Novelists

Three Approaches

Three Approaches

The Great House — By Stanley Weyman
The Splendid Fairing — By Constance Holme
Richard Kurt — By Stephen Hudson

The citizens of Reality are ‘tied to town’ and very content to be so tied, very thankful to look out of window on to a good substantial wall, plastered over with useful facts and topped with a generous sprinkle of broken bottle page 100 glass. Nevertheless, they are for ever sighing to travel. Not that they are prepared for long and difficult journeys. On the contrary. What they cannot have enough of is the small excursion, the timid flight just half-way to somewhere, just so far that Reality and its wall is out of sight while they picnic in the unfamiliar landscape, which distracts, but does not disturb.

A glance at the inside title-page of Mr. Stanley Weyman's new novel tells us that he has provided many such a festa, and another at the list of chapter headings assures us how expert he has become at his particular form of entertainment. The chapter headings are curiously revealing; they are like a list of stations on a particular railway line from which we learn the kind of country the train passes through, as well as its starting point and its destination: The Hotel Lambert—Homeward Bound—The Gatehouse—The Yew Walk—The Great House at Beaudelays—My Lord Speaks—Mary is Lonely—Missing—A Footstep in the Hall—Mary makes a Discovery—My Lord Speaks Out—A Turn of the Wheel—‘Let us make others thankful.’ Here is the little touch of historical France of which the author is so fond, then the lonely heroine brought to England by her kinsman, Lord Audley, to the house of his cousin and his enemy. Why his enemy? His cousin lays claim to the title. If a certain Bible could be found and certain papers…. My Lord is fair without and false within. He woos and wins Mary by his masterfulness. The cousin is old and wicked, dying of heart disease and revenge; his faithful servant listens at keyholes and behind bushes. And there is another, a good silent man who sees it all and says nothing—but acts. The will is found, the cousin dies, Mary breaks off her engagement and reengages herself to the silent one, and burns the will into the bargain. If wills are as agile as novelists and playwrights would have us believe, it is no wonder they provide an inexhaustible subject…. According to them, the soul no sooner flies from the body than the will takes parchment wings unto itself and flies also—up the page 101 chimney, down into the cellar, or behind the portrait with the piercing eyes.

Miss Constance Holme makes her appeal to a very different public. Whereas Mr. Weyman impresses us as an author who is as conscious of his audience as is a producer of plays—he has his eye upon it all the time, heightening an effect here, keeping this back, putting in a pair of branched candlesticks or the muffled tramp of many feet for its delight, never for his—we are certain Miss Holme would go on writing if every publisher in England (which Heaven forbid) forsook his calling and ran away to sea. We have not seldom remarked the curious naive pleasure that many women take in writing for writing's sake. The mind pictures them half wonder, half joy, to find that they can put these lovely tender-coloured words together—can string these exquisite sentences out of a morning's ramble in the garden or the meadow or gathering cold seashells…. But it is a dangerous delight, for what so often happens is that they are quite carried away, forgetting all about the pattern they intended to follow or embroidering it so thickly that none but themselves can discover its original outline.

Something of this fate has overtaken ‘The Splendid Fairing.’ The pattern is yet another peasant drama, ‘Perhaps it never would have happened but for the day,’ says the authoress, and she goes on to describe the kind of day that would have put it out of the question, and finally the day that brought it to pass.

… Everywhere … there was mist—that strange, wandering thinking mist that seems to have nothing to do with either earth or air; and when the slow dark drew back there would be mist everywhere again.

So thick are its dropping veils that Miss Holme's novel is at times completely hidden; is, as it were, frayed away, spun away in a delicate white woolliness. She has her story to tell of a little feud between two families. Each family has a son, like each other as two peas, and they run page 102 away to Canada. When one comes back his half-blind mother takes him for the other, and to revenge her lifelong hatred sends him out at night to what she knows is his certain death by ‘the white tide horses.’ It is an improbable story at best, and Miss Holme's attention is well-nigh persistently divided between the telling of it and all the wavy shapes and shadows, the gull, the heron, and the marsh, that she finds irresistible, until at last she would seem to believe that the attention of the peasant is equally divided, and that he, too, hears ‘the messenger from the deep, sweeping its garment over the head of the crouched waste as it sped to deliver its challenge at the locked gate of the sea wall.’ But this is a little pit lying at the feet of all who write about peasants….

The attitude of the author of ‘Richard Kurt’ to his audience is a far more complex affair. Reading the first chapter we were under the impression that this was a sequel to a former novel in which Richard's childhood, marriage, and life had been described, with such a wave of the hand were these events mentioned and dismissed. Then on page 3 there occurred an extraordinarily minute description of Richard's father: ‘He wore a short, square-cut beard which, originally red, had turned gradually, with years, to a golden-grey. The hair, though thinned, was yet uncommonly plentiful for a man approaching sixty, and curled away from its central parting in large, crisp, grey-brown waves above a forehead unusually high and broad and white. The eyes, nearly always averted save for swift glances, were dark and small and very piercing….’ and so on, down to ‘the hand … slender and symmetrical, with long fingers … covered with red hair.’ The whole tone of that is of an introduction; it reads indeed like the beginning of a first novel; there is a kind of over-eagerness to make Mr. Kurt vivid in the abundant use of the adjectives. This tone is more or less maintained until, with the second chapter, we find ourselves—certainly not introduced to—but asked to accept most fully and freely—the fact of Elinor.

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It happens sometimes, perhaps, that sitting in a railway carriage at night, or sleeping in a steamer cabin, we overhear a long conversation about a third, and the conversation is punctuated with: ‘Well, you know what she is like’ or ‘You can imagine what she said to that’—and we find ourselves, nodding and smiling and shaking our head—we can indeed! Thus it is that Mr. Stephen Hudson conveys this brilliant and horrible little personality to us—as though he were talking to someone who knew all about her from the beginning—and we, his readers, are overhearing what they have to say. Gradually we learn that she is dark and slender, with tiny feet and long eyelashes; that she loves to dress in pale blue; that she has a passion for minute dogs. This is the outward Elinor. But her temper, her jealousy, her boundless vanity and extravagance—this is Elinor as we know her after we have listened. There is no plot to the novel; it is an account of how Richard Kurt wasted, idled through several years of his life, now happily and now unhappily. He is never more than a shadow; but first Elinor and then Virginia, the second woman of the book, are amazingly real.

(November 7, 1919.)