A Post-War and a Victorian Novel

Cousin Philip — By Mrs. Humphrey Ward
Benjy — By George Stevenson

Those gentle readers who fell some years ago under the fascinations of Delia Blanchflower, an ardent feminist, aged twenty-two, who was placed at her father's dying wish under the guardianship of a still youthful, courteous English gentleman of caressing manners, but stamped by a mysterious sorrow, will find a very similar thrill waiting for them to-day in the person of Helena Pitstone, heroine of ‘Cousin Philip,’ an ardent ‘modern’ aged nineteen, who was placed at her mother's dying wish under the guardianship of a still youthful, courteous English gentleman of caressing manners, but stamped by an even more mysterious sorrow. In both cases the extremely beautiful young ladies resent bitterly this interference with their personal liberty and declare war against their page 127 guardians; both desire to be friendly with a gentleman who has been mixed up in an unpleasant divorce case, both reluctantly fall in love with the enemy, and both come to recognize the old, old charm of man's strength and woman's weakness. Delia, tripping on a flight of steps, falls and is caught by quick strong fingers; Helena, stepping out of a boat, falls and has the like experience.

But in order delightfully to confound those readers who have put white strings in their bonnets against a second, similar wedding, Mrs. Ward gives her new heroine to Another. We are not satisfied. Helena ought to have married Cousin Philip and filled his house with the clamour of innocent children. She ought to have removed the pucker from that distinguished brow, given him back his old enthusiasm for life, and perhaps even, by and by, persuaded him to take up his sketching again—but it was not to be. What was in Mark Winnington the gentle sorrow of seeing the girl to whom he was engaged pine away and die becomes in the case of Cousin Philip the agony of a wild Bohemian wife returning to die in the Vicarage at the very gates of his Park, leaving a mentally defective child of whose existence he had hitherto been unaware. And strangely, Mrs. Ward makes us feel that the larger tragedy is not of her choosing; it cuts across the flowing lines of her book, spoiling the pattern. How much more suitable if the wife were well and truly dead in a foreign town, and the little boy just pathetically lame enough to discover in the eyes of Helena the shadow of a brooding tenderness! But the war, widening our horizons, demands the wider view.

‘Cousin Philip’ is from first to last a post-war novel. As we have suggested, it is the story of a wild girl's taming. For from the moment of her entrance, complete even to khaki leggings, driving the great Rolls-Royce and roundly scolding the discomfited chauffeur at her side, it is Helena alone who carries the book upon her radiant shoulders. She is, we are given most clearly to understand, the kind of girl that the war has produced and—what is to be done page 128 with her, in fine, now that the canteens are closed and there are no more wounded soldiers to fetch from the railway stations? Here is this dazzling, imperious creature, the living image of one of the Romney sketches of Lady Hamilton as a bacchante, talking slang with the ardour of a small boy after his first term at school, snubbing her elders, laying down the law, having as many ‘boys’ as she pleases, and demanding that she shall be told why a bad man is bad. What is to be done with Helena Pitstone, defying the world, crying that:

The chauffeur here is a fractious idiot. He has done that Rolls-Royce car of Cousin Philip's balmy, and cut up quite rough when I told him about it?

No wonder Cousin Philip and the chaperone, ‘a person of gentle manners and quiet antecedents,’ whom he has chosen to help him, are martyrs to misgivings; no wonder Mrs. Ward cannot resist piling delicate agony upon delicate agony until we are brim full of anticipatory shudders. And then quite suddenly we are aware that the author is quietly laughing at her creation and our tremors. What is all this pother about? What is all this nonsense about freedom and life on one's own? There is the good old-fashioned remedy ready to hand that never fails, even in the most serious cases—marriage and children. It will be a supreme consolation for distracted parents to read that their young people are just like any other young people. True, they have been through a trying experience at a critical period, but there is no reason why it should have any lasting effect. Think once more to Delia Blanchflower and the dreadful part she played in the Militant Suffrage Movement—and yet love won the day. Once they find the right man to look after them and are kept busy and out of mischief furnishing the little nest, modern women will be as safe as their grandmothers once they find the right partners. But suppose, we find ourselves asking as we lay the book aside, there should not be enough partners to go round? In page 129 the world of ‘Cousin Philip’ such questions are not asked, much less answered.

‘We go not, but we are carried; as things that float; now gliding gently; now hulling violently; according as the water is either storm or calm.’ These words, which Mr. Stevenson quotes as a heading to Part IV. of his ‘Benjy,’ might well be applied to the whole. In them is contained the spirit of the book—a something gentle that neither protests nor demands, but bows before the inevitable and is resigned. It is an account of the lives and fortunes of a country doctor and his family from the year 1859, when Johnnie marries his Priscilla, to 1914, when ‘Benjy,’ one of the younger children and now a middle-aged man, bids his favourite sister ‘good-bye’ the night he leaves for France. The author's demands upon us are very gentle. He invites the reader to accompany him to where the little spring first outgushes, to follow its course over difficult stony ground to where it flows wide and shallow through fields of childhood, on, ever-widening and deepening until it breaks into many tiny rivulets that lose one another, meet again, part, but never again mingle. A curious mixture of reminiscence and quiet speculation is characteristic of the author's style during his pious pilgrimage. He pauses, broods over this and that, reaches forward and looks backward, until we feel it would make little or no difference were we to read the book from the end to the beginning, rather than the common way. But this leisurely style has its special temptations. It affords the author far too many opportunities for poking sly fun at tiny incidents that will not bear being thus isolated, for involving them in nets of fantastical words (in which they quite disappear from sight) until, carried away by the amusing exercise, he finds it very difficult to recapture the thread of his story.

But as long as the twelve little Ainsworth children are at home and running about in their father's fields and their mother's house, ‘Benjy’ is not without a certain charm. It is difficult to make the memories of an early childhood page 130 spent in a fine freedom from surveillance uninteresting. We like to hear about their special ways, to wander over the old-fashioned house, to be shown their secret haunts and to be told that the sheep were called Mrs. Flop, Mrs. Slop and Mrs. Nan. It is only when they grow older and come into touch with the world that Mr. Stevenson fails lamentably. The quaint, old-fashioned children are replaced by plain, strange young men and women, and the author in his effort to convince us of Benjy's purity of heart pours over him such a pale flood of sentimentality that he is drowned before our eyes.