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Novels and Novelists

A Witty Sentimentalist

A Witty Sentimentalist

In the Mountains — Anon.

It is not difficult to decide who is the author of ‘In the Mountains,’1 and the absence of difficulty is part of the proof that it is a good book. Individuality is hard to come by nowadays, and it covers a multitude of sins, as Uncle Rudolph found when he proposed (on about the last page) to Dolly. The sins to be covered by this author's individuality are none of them very big ones—the worst being a trick of invoking the amorphous God of modern optimism to give an air of seriousness and weight to things that do not really need it. ‘Nothing in winter,’ she writes, describing her mountains, ‘but the ineffable cold smell of what, again for want of a better word, I can only describe as God.’ The God who comes in to help one out of a literary emergency is a fairly familiar figure nowadays; but we don't like him any the better for that. And we like him the less when he interferes, as he occasionally does in this book, with the expression of an individuality we do like.

And how delightful the author of ‘In the Mountains’ can be! To her wit and whimsy is added an irrepressible, palpable delight, which one can feel and share, in the airs and graces of writing. She has a delicate pen that lovingly shapes her phrase, and an instinct that keeps it true to experience, ‘as though one were writing a letter to somebody who loves one, and who will want to know, with the sweet eagerness and solicitude of love, what one page 249 does and what the place one is in looks like.’ That is not the whole of her, by any means; there is a detachment and a touch of worldly wisdom added to a fond of femininity that make of her quite definitely an artist.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about her equipment, her composition, her make-up, is the slight instability in the mixture of her elements. She is profoundly a sentimentalist, and her sentimentality keeps jumping out in spite of all the ironical detachment she can muster against it. She cannot really control it—‘God’ is merely one of its temporary disguises—and one cannot help speculating whether she would be a better writer if she could. It is the malign fate of writers with the gift of wit that we should always be asking them to be witty, that they should tighten the firmness of their exquisite control most sedulously there where they want to be free of it for a moment. In the sentimental vein the touch of the author of ‘In the Mountains’ seems a little less than secure.

But amusing and entertaining books are so rare that we cannot leave this one with a grumble. The whole story of Miss Barnes and Dolly ‘Jewks’ and Uncle Rudolph (the Dean) is splendidly told, and there is a page at the beginning of that long episode, on the feminine theme that ‘what one has on underneath does somehow ooze through into one's behaviour,’ which is inimitable. In the same genre, peculiarly this author's own, is a little anecdote of her being discovered by her Swiss handyman, in the fancy dress of a devil, in the act of going into her bedroom to look for her tail. It is perfect.

(August 27, 1920.)

1 The author of ‘Elizabeth and her German Garden.’