Part 6

On reading this over again I discover that she has got over the London School of Economics, though her first two books showed heavy the brand of Clare Market. Miss Amber Reeves started out to do good, but has fortunately repented. She has not written many novels, only three in five years, an enviable record, and they were good novels, with faults that are not those of Mrs Barclay or of Mr Hall Caine. Over every chapter the Blue Book hovered. Her first novel, _The Reward of Virtue_, exhibited the profound hopelessness of youth. For Evelyn Baker, daughter of a mother who was glad she was a girl because 'girls are so much easier,' was doomed to lead the stupid life. Plump, handsome, fond of pink, she lived in Notting Hill, went to dances, loved the artist and married the merchant, knew she did not love the merchant and went on living with him; she took to good works, grew tired of them, and gave birth to a girl child, thanking fate because 'girls are so much easier.' The story of Evelyn is so much the story of everybody that it seems difficult to believe it is the story of anybody. But it is. _The Reward of Virtue_ is a remarkable piece of realism, and it is evidence of taste in a first novel to choose a stupid heroine, and not one who plays Vincent d'Indy and marries somebody called Hugo.

In that book Miss Amber Reeves indicated accomplishment, but this was rather slight; only in her second novel, _A Lady and Her Husband_, was she to develop her highest quality: the understanding of the ordinary man. (All young women novelists understand the artist, or nobody does; the man they seldom understand is the one who spends fifty years successfully paying bills.) The ordinary man is Mr Heyham, who runs tea shops and easily controls a handsome wife of forty-five, while he fails to control Fabian daughters and a painfully educated son. He runs his tea shops for profit, while Mrs Heyham comes to the unexpected view that he should run them for the good of his girls. There is a revolution in Hampstead when she discovers that Mr Heyham does not, for the girls are sweated; worse still, she sees that to pay them better will not help much, for extra wages will not mean more food but only more hats. They are all vivid, the hard, lucid daughters, the soft and illogical Mrs Heyham, and especially Mr Heyham, kindly, loving, generous, yet capable of every beastliness while maintaining his faith in his own rectitude. Mr Heyham is a triumph, for he is just everybody; he is 'the man with whose experiences women are trained to sympathise while he is not trained to sympathise with theirs.' He is the ordinary, desirous man, the male. Listen to this analysis of man: 'He has a need to impress himself on the world he finds outside him, an impulse that drives him to achieve his ends recklessly, ruthlessly, through any depth of suffering and conflict ... it is just by means of the qualities that are often so irritating, their tiresome restlessness, their curiosity, their disregard for security, for seemliness, even for life itself, that men have mastered the world and filled it with the wealth of civilisation. It is after this foolish, disorganised fashion of theirs, each of them--difficult, touchy creatures--busy with his personal ambitions, that they have armed the race with science, dignified it with art--one can take men lightly but one cannot take lightly the things that men have done.'

That sort of man sweats his waitresses because such is his duty to the shareholders. It is in this sort of man, Mr Heyham, who wants more money, in Edward Day, the prig who hates spending it, that Miss Amber Reeves realises herself. Analysis rather than evocation is her mission; she does not as a rule seek beauty, and when she strives, as in her last novel, _Helen in Love_, where a cheap little minx is kissed on the beach and is thus inspired, Miss Amber Reeves fails to achieve beauty in people; she achieves principally affectation. Beauty is not her _metier_; irony and pity are nearer to her, which is not so bad if we reflect that such is the motto of Anatole France. Oh! she is no mocking literary sprite, as the Frenchman, nor has she his graces; she is somewhat tainted by the seriousness of life, but she has this to distinguish her from her fellows: she can achieve laughter without hatred.

One should not, however, dismiss in a few words this latest novel. One can disregard the excellent picture of the lower-middle class family from which Helen springs, its circumscribed nastiness, its vulgar pleasure in appearances, for Miss Amber Reeves has done as good work before. But one must observe her new impulse towards the rich, idle, cultured people, whom she idealises so that they appear as worn ornaments of silver-gilt. It seems that she is reacting against indignation, that she is turning away from social reform towards the caste that has achieved a corner in graces. It may be that she has come to think the world incurable and wishes to retire as an anchorite ... only she retires to Capua: this is not good, for any withdrawal into a selected atmosphere implies that criticism of this atmosphere is suspended. Nothing so swiftly as that kills virility in literature.

But even so Miss Amber Reeves distinguishes herself from her immediate rivals, Miss Viola Meynell, Miss Bridget Maclagan, Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith, Miss Katherine Gerould, by an interest in business and in politics. She really knows what is a limited liability company or an issue warrant. She is not restricted to love, but embraces such problems as money, rank, science, class habits, which serve or destroy love. She finds her way in the modern tangle where emotion and cupidity trundle together on a dusty road. She is not always just, but she is usually judicial. Her men are rather gross instead of strong; she likes them, she tolerates them, they are altogether brutes and 'poor dears.' But then we are most of us a little like that.

3. SHEILA KAYE-SMITH

I do not know whether this is a compliment, but I should not be surprised if a reader of, say, _Starbrace_ or _Sussex Gorse_, were to think that Sheila Kaye-Smith is the pen-name of a man. Just as one suspects those racy tales of guardsmen, signed 'Joseph Brown' or 'George Kerr,' of originating from some scented boudoir, so does one hesitate before the virility, the cognisance of oath and beer, of rotating crop, sweating horse, account book, vote and snickersnee that Sheila Kaye-Smith exhibits in all her novels. This is broader, deeper than the work of the women novelists of to-day, who, with the exception of Amber Reeves, are confined in a circle of eternally compounding pallid or purple loves. One side of her work, notably, surprises, and that is the direction of her thoughts away from women, their great and little griefs, towards men and the glory of their combat against fate. Sheila Kaye-Smith is more than any of her rivals the true novelist: the showman of life.

Yet she is a woman. You will imagine her as seeming small, but not so; very thin, with a grace all made of quiescence, her eyes gray and retracted a little, as if always in pain because man is not so beautiful as the earth that bore him, because he fails in idealism, falls away from his hopes and cannot march but only shamble from one eternity into another. There is in her a sort of cosmic choler restrained by a Keltic pride that is ready to pretend a world made up of rates and taxes and the 9.2 train to London Bridge. Afire within, she will not allow herself to 'commit melodrama.' In _Isle of Thorns_ her heroine, Sally Odiarne, so describes her attempt to murder her lover, and I like to think of Sheila Kaye-Smith's will leashing the passion that strains. I like even more to think of the same will giving rein to anger, of a converse cry: 'Commit melodrama! I jolly well shall! I'm justabout sick of things!'

'Justabout!' That word, free-scattered in the speech of her rustics, is all Sussex. For Sheila Kaye-Smith has given expression to the county that from the Weald spreads green-breasted to meet the green sea. In all the novels is the slow Sussex speech, dotted with the kindly 'surelye,' the superlative 'unaccountable'; women are 'praaper,' ladies 'valiant,' troubles 'tedious.' It has colour, it is true English, unstained of Cockneyism and American. It is the speech of the oasthouse, of the cottage on the marsh, of the forester's hut in Udimore Wood, where sings the lark and rivulets flow like needles through the moss.

_Assez de litterature!_ Sheila Kaye-Smith is not a painter, even though with dew diamonds the thorn-bush she spangle. Her Sussex is male: it is not the dessicated Sussex of the modern novelist, but the Sussex of the smuggler, of the Methodist, the squire; the Sussex where men sweat, and read no books. Old Sussex, and the Sussex of to-day which some think was created by the L.B. & S.C. Railway, she loves them both, and in both has found consolation, but I think she loves best the old. It was old Sussex made her first novel, _The Tramping Methodist_. Old Sussex bred its hero, Humphrey Lyte. He was a picaresque hero, the young rebel, for he grew enmeshed in murder and in love, in the toils of what England called justice in days when the Regent went to Brighton. But Lyte does not reveal Sheila Kaye-Smith as does _Starbrace_. Here is the apologia for the rebel: Starbrace, the son of a poor and disgraced man, will not eat the bread of slavery at his grandfather's price. You will imagine the old man confronted with this boy, of gentle blood but brought up as a labourer's son, hot, unruly, lusting for the freedom of the wet earth. Starbrace is a fool; disobedient he is to be flogged. He escapes among the smugglers on Winchelsea marsh, to the wild world of the mid-eighteenth century. It is a world of fighting, and of riding, of blood, of excisemen, of the 'rum pads' and their mistresses, their dicing and their death. Despite his beloved, Theodora Straightway, lady who fain would have him gentleman, Starbrace must ride away upon his panting horse, Pharisee. Love as he may, he cannot live like a rabbit in a hutch; he must have danger, be taken, cast into a cell, be released to die by the side of Pharisee, charging the Pretender's bodyguard at Prestonpans. All this is fine, for she has the secret of the historical novel: to show not the things that have changed, but those which have not.

_Starbrace_ is, perhaps, Sheila Kaye-Smith's most brilliant flight, but not her most sustained. She has had other adventures in literature, such as _Isle of Thorns_, where Sally Odiarne wanders with Stanger's travelling show, hopelessly entangled in her loves, unable to seize happiness, unable to give herself to the tender Raphael, bound to good-tempered, sensual Andy, until at last she must kill Andy to get free, kill him to escape to the sea and die. But she finds God:--

'She had come out to seek death, and had found life. Who can stand against life, the green sea that tumbles round one's limbs and tears up like matchwood the breakwaters one has built? There, kneeling in the surf and spray, Sally surrendered to life.'

Sheila Kaye-Smith has not surrendered to life, though the weakness of her may be found in another book, _Three Against the World_, where the worthless Furlonger family can but writhe as worms drying in the sun; in the tired flatness of her last work, _The Challenge to Sirius_. The vagary of her mind is in such work as criticism: she has published a study of John Galsworthy which is judicial, though not inspired. But she was destined for finer tasks. Already in _Spell Land_, the story of a Sussex farm where lived two people, driven out of the village because they loved unwed, she had given a hint of her power to see not only man but the earth. She has almost stated herself in _Sussex Gorse_.

I have read many reviews of this book. I am tired of being told it is 'epic.' It is not quite; it has all the grace that Zola lacked in _La Terre_, but if the beauty is anything it is Virgilian, not Homeric. The scheme is immense, the life of Reuben Backfield, of Odiam, inspired in early youth with the determination to possess Boarzell, the common grown with gorse and firs, the fierce land of marl and shards where naught save gorse could live. The opening is a riot, for the Enclosures Act is in force and the squire is seizing the people's land. In that moment is born Reuben's desire; Boarzell shall be his. He buys some acres and his struggle is frightful; you see his muscles bulging in his blue shirt, you smell his sweat, you hear the ploughshare gripped with the stones, teeth biting teeth. For Boarzell Common is old, crafty, and savage, and would foil man. Reuben is not foiled; he can bear all things, so can dare all things. He buys more land; there shall be on his farm no pleasure so that he may have money to crush Boarzell. His brother, Harry, is struck while Reuben blows up the enemy trees, and haunts his life, a horrible, idiot figure; his wife, Naomi, ground down by forced child-bearing (for Boarzell needs men and Reuben sons) dies. His six sons, devoid of the money Boarzell takes, leave him; one becomes a thief, another a sailor, another a sot in London, another a success; all leave him, even his daughters; one to marry a hated rival farmer, one to love because Reuben forbade love, and to end on the streets. He loses all, he loses his pretty second wife, he loses Alice Jury whom alone he loved, he loses the sons that Rose gave him. He gives all to Boarzell, to fighting it for seventy years, sometimes victor, sometimes crushed, for Boarzell is evil and fierce:

'It lay in a great hush, a great solitude, a quiet beast of power and mystery. It seemed to call to him through the twilight like a love forsaken. There it lay: Boarzell--strong, beautiful, desired, untamed, still his hope, still his battle.'

There are faults, here and there, degraded cliches; Sheila Kaye-Smith loves the stars too well, and often indulges in horrid astronomic orgies; there is not enough actual combat with the earth; the author intervenes, points to the combat instead of leaving at grips the two beasts, Reuben and Boarzell. She has not quite touched the epic, yet makes us want to resemble the hero, fierce, cruel, but great when old and alone, still indomitable. And one wonders what she will do, what she will be. There are lines in her poems, _Willow's Forge_, that prophesy; the moment may be enough:--

'When the last constellations faint and fall, When the last planets burst in fiery foam, When all the winds have sunk asleep, when all The worn way-weary comets have come home-- When past and present and the future flee, My moment lives!'

She may strive no more, as she proposes to the seeker in _The Counsel of Gilgamesh_:--

'Why wander round Gilgamesh? Why vainly wander round? What canst thou find, O seeker, Which hath not long been found?

What canst thou know, O scholar, Which hath not long been known? What canst thou have, O spoiler, Which dead men did not own?'

But I do not think so. I do not know whether she will be great. It is enough that to-day she is already alone.

Form and the Novel

Every now and then a reviewer, recovering the enthusiasm of a critic, discovers that the English novel has lost its form, that the men who to-day, a little ineffectually, bid for immortality, are burning the gods they once worshipped. They declare that the novel, because it is no longer a story travelling harmoniously from a beginning towards a middle and an end, is not a novel at all, that it is no more than a platform where self-expression has given place to self-proclamation. And sometimes, a little more hopefully, they venture to prophesy that soon the proud Sicambrian will worship the gods that he burnt.

I suspect that this classic revival is not very likely to come about. True, some writers, to-day in their cradles, may yet emulate Flaubert, but they will not be Flaubert. They may take something of his essence and blend it with their own; but that will create a new essence, for literature does not travel in a circle. Rather it travels along a cycloid, bending back upon itself, following the movement of man. Everything in the world we inhabit conspires to alter in the mirror of literature the picture it reflects; haste, luxury, hysterical sensuousness, race-optimism and race-despair. And notably publicity, the attitude of the Press. For the time has gone when novels were written for young ladies, and told the placid love of Edwin and Angeline; nowadays the novel, growing ambitious, lays hands upon science, commerce, philosophy: we write less of moated granges, more of tea-shops and advertising agencies, for the Press is teaching the people to look to the novel for a cosmic picture of the day, for a cosmic commentary.

Evidently it was not always so. Flaubert, de Maupassant, Butler, Tolstoy (who are not a company of peers), aspired mainly 'to see life sanely and to see it whole.' Because they lived in days of lesser social complexity, economically speaking, they were able to use a purely narrative style, the only notable living exponent of which is Mr Thomas Hardy. But we, less fortunate perhaps, confronted with new facts, the factory system, popular education, religious unrest, pictorial rebellion, must adapt ourselves and our books to the new spirit. I do not pretend that the movement has been sudden. Many years before _L'Education Sentimentale_ was written, Stendhal had imported chaos (with genius) into the spacious 'thirties. But Stendhal was a meteor: Dostoievsky and Mr Romain Rolland had to come to break up the old narrative form, to make the road for Mr Wells and for the younger men who attempt, not always successfully, to crush within the covers of an octavo volume the whole of the globe spinning round its axis, to express with an attitude the philosophy of life, to preach by gospel rather than by statement.

Such movements as these naturally breed a reaction, and I confess that, when faced with the novels of the 'young men,' so turgid, so bombastic, I turn longing eyes towards the still waters of Turgenev, sometimes even towards my first influence, now long discarded--the novels of Zola. Though the Zeitgeist hold my hand and bid me abandon my characters, forget that they should be people like ourselves, living, loving, dying, and this enough; though it suggest to me that I should analyse the economic state, consider what new world we are making, enlist under the banner of the 'free spirits' or of the 'simple life,' I think I should turn again towards the old narrative simplicities, towards the schedules of what the hero said, and of what the vicar had in his drawing-room, if I were not conscious that form evolves.

If literature be at all a living force it must evolve as much as man, and more if it is to lead him; it must establish a correspondence between itself and the uneasy souls for which it exists. So it is no longer possible to content ourselves with such as Jane Austen; we must exploit ourselves. Ashamed as we are of the novel with a purpose, we can no longer write novels without a purpose. We need to express the motion of the world rather than its contents. While the older novelists were static, we have to be kinetic: is not the picture-palace here to give us a lesson and to remind us that the waxworks which delighted our grandfathers have gone?

But evolution is not quite the same thing as revolution. I do believe that revolution is only evolution in a hurry; but revolution can be in too great a hurry, and cover itself with ridicule. When the Futurists propose to suppress the adjective, the adverb, the conjunction, and to make of literature a thing of 'positive substantives' and 'dynamic verbs'--when Mr Peguy repeats over and over again the same sentence because, in his view, that is how we think--we smile. We are both right and wrong to smile, for these people express in the wrong way that which is the right thing. The modern novel has and must have a new significance. It is not enough that the novelist should be cheery as Dickens, or genially cynical as Thackeray, or adventurous as Fielding. The passions of men, love, hunger, patriotism, worship, all these things must now be shared between the novelist and his reader. He must collaborate with his audience ... emulate the show-girls in a revue, abandon the stage, and come parading through the stalls. A new passion is born, and it is a complex of the old passions; the novelist of to-day cannot end as Montaigne, say that he goes to seek a great perhaps. He needs to be more positive, to aspire to know what we are doing with the working-class, with the Empire, the woman question, and the proper use of lentils. It is this aspiration towards truth that breaks up the old form: you cannot tell a story in a straightforward manner when you do but glimpse it through the veil of the future.

And so it goes hard with Edwin and Angeline. We have no more time to tell that love; we need to break up their simple story, to consider whether they are eugenically fitted for each other, and whether their marriage settlement has a bearing upon national finance. Inevitably we become chaotic; the thread of our story is tangled in the threads which bind the loves of all men. We must state, moralise, explain, analyse motives, because we try to fit into a steam civilisation the old horse-plough of our fathers. I do not think that we shall break the old plough; now and then we may use it upon sands, but there is much good earth for it to turn.

Sincerity: the Publisher and the Policeman

There is always much talk of sincerity in literature. It is a favourite topic in literary circles, but often the argument sounds vain, for English literature seldom attains sincerity; it may never do so until Englishmen become Russians or Frenchmen, which, in spite of all temptations, they are not likely to do.

Once upon a time we had a scapegoat ready, the circulating libraries, for they made themselves ridiculous when they banned _Black Sheep_ and _The Uncounted Cost_, while every now and then they have banned a book of artistic value, likely to lead astray the mothers rather than the daughters. Like the others, I foamed and fumed against the libraries, who after all were only conducting their business according to their commercial interests; like many others, I set up the idea that the circulating library was a sort of trustee for literature, and after this coronation I abused the library as one unworthy of a crown. It was rather unfair, for the conditions which militate against the free embodiment of brute facts into fiction form prevailed before the Library Censorship was thought of; the libraries have not made public opinion but followed it; nowadays they slightly influence it. For public opinion is not the opinion of the public, it is the opinion of a minority. The opinion of a minority makes the opinion of the majority, because the latter has, as a rule, no opinion at all.