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Three Women Novelists

Hope Trueblood — By Patience Worth
The House of Courage — By Mrs. Victor Rickard
The Tunnel — By Dorothy Richardson

Very often, after reading a modern novel, the question suggests itself: Why was it written? And the answer is not always immediate. Indeed, there is no answer; it is perhaps a little reflection on our present authors that there can be so many and of so diverse a kind. One of our famous young novelists half solves the problem for us by stating, in a foreword to his latest book, that he wrote it because he could not help himself, because he was ‘compelled’ to—but half solves it only. For we cannot help wondering, when the book is finished and laid by, as to the nature of that mysterious compulsion. It is terrifying to think of the number of novels that are written and announced and published and to be had of all libraries, and reviewed and bought and borrowed and read, and left in hotel lounges and omnibuses and railway carriages and deck chairs. Is it possible to believe that each one of them was once the darling offspring of some proud author,—his cherished hope in whom he lives his second richer life?

Public Opinion, garrulous, lying old nurse that she is, cries: ‘Yes! Great books, immortal books are being born every minute, each one more lusty than the last. Let him who is without sin among you cast the first criticism.’ It would be a superb, thrilling world if this were true! Or if even a very moderate number of them were anything but little puppets, little make-believes, playthings on strings with the same stare and the same sawdust filling, just unlike enough to keep the attention distracted, but all like enough to do nothing more profound. After all, in these lean years of plenty how could it be otherwise? Not even the most hardened reader, at the rate books are page 2 written and read nowadays, could stand up against so many attacks upon his mind and heart, if it were. Reading, for the great majority—for the reading public—is not a passion but a pastime, and writing, for the vast number of modern authors, is a pastime and not a passion.

Miss Patience Worth's ‘Hope Trueblood’ is almost too good an example of the pastime novel. It never for one moment touches the real world or the realm of fäery, preferring to linger in that ‘valley of soft springs’ which lies between, where every echo is a sigh, every voice a cry upon the wind, where Melodrama has his castle and Sentimentality is the weeping lady of the tower.

The story is an old one; it is the Bastard's Progress. A little child without a father is left at her mother's death to the cruel mercies of a virtuous village. Although she has the ‘sunshine smile’ and: ‘there is a bud here, I beat my heart over,’ she is doomed. She is the little innocent lamb branded with the sign of shame who must be sacrificed. To make this tragedy more pitiful, Miss Worth causes her lamb to speak in a special language, a kind of theatrical pot-pourri, and by the time the end is reached there is not a device or an ornament left in the property-box. Even the symbolic white butterfly has flown into the air: ‘Up-up-up!’ Added to this, Miss Worth has thrown over all a veil of mystery which never is lifted wholly. Now and again a corner flutters, but if we venture to look beneath it is dropped again—and our curiosity with it.

‘Can you read this, O reader? Try! Try! for my foolish tears are flowing and I cannot see.’ It would require a simple soul indeed to be beguiled by such mock pearls. But we stand amazed before her publisher's announcement. However much support she may need, it is surely unfair to announce her with so extraordinary a flourish of trumpets without. This is lion's music and should be kept for their coming.

Mrs. Victor Rickard is a skilled competent writer of a very different type of book. The theme of her ‘House of page 3 Courage’ is not new; nor is there, in her treatment of it, a variation with which we have not become familiar during the past four years. There are the opening scenes before the war, light, domestic, carefree, with the principal love interest just beginning, followed by the gathering storm, then the war itself, threatening to destroy everything, but not destroying everything, and then the afterglow, which is like the opening scene, but richer, more sober, and with the principal love interest fulfilled. To write this type of work successfully it is essential that all the characters should be of the same class—the men, well-bred, well-dressed, and ‘thorough sportsmen’—the women, equally well bred and dressed and the cheeriest of souls. The atmosphere must be an upper middle-class atmosphere and, even if the ‘sheer horror of it all’ threatens to engulf them, one golden rule must be observed: they never give way. For these are not real whole people; they are aspects of people, living examples of appropriate and charming behaviour before and during the war. All this Mrs. Rickard knows and understands. From the first paragraph the story flows from her easy pen with unwavering fluency, one of those hundreds of novels which do not send you to sleep, but—do not keep you awake.

Why was it written? The question does not present itself—it is the last question one would ask after reading ‘The Tunnel.’ Miss Richardson has a passion for registering every single thing that happens in the clear, shadowless country of her mind. One cannot imagine her appealing to the reader or planning out her novel; her concern is primarily, and perhaps ultimately, with herself. ‘What cannot I do with this mind of mine!’ one can fancy her saying. ‘What can I not see and remember and express?’ There are times when she seems deliberately to set it a task, just for the joy of realizing again how brilliant a machine it is, and we, too, share her admiration for its power of absorbing. Anything that goes into her mind she can summon forth again, and there it is, complete in every detail, with nothing taken away from it—and page 4 nothing added. This is a rare and interesting gift, but we should hesitate before saying it was a great one.

‘The Tunnel’ is the fourth volume of Miss Richardson's adventures with her soul-sister, Miriam Henderson. Like them, it is composed of bits, fragments, flashing glimpses, half scenes and whole scenes, all of them quite distinct and separate, and all of them of equal importance. There is no plot, no beginning, middle or end. Things just ‘happen’ one after another with incredible rapidity and at break-neck speed. There is Miss Richardson, holding out her mind, as it were, and there is Life hurling objects into it as fast as she can throw. And at the appointed time Miss Richardson dives into its recesses and reproduces a certain number of these treasures—a pair of button boots, a night in Spring, some cycling knickers, some large, round biscuits—as many as she can pack into a book, in fact. But the pace kills.

There is one who could not live in so tempestuous an environment as her mind—and he is Memory. She has no memory. It is true that Life is sometimes very swift and breathless, but not always. If we are to be truly alive there are large pauses in which we creep away into our caves of contemplation. And then it is, in the silence, that Memory mounts his throne and judges all that is in our minds—appointing each his separate place, high or low, rejecting this, selecting that—putting this one to shine in the light and throwing that one into the darkness.

We do not mean to say that those large, round biscuits might not be in the light, or the night in Spring be in the darkness. Only we feel that until these things are judged and given each its appointed place in the whole scheme, they have no meaning in the world of art.