NEW VOICE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 99, 29 April 1933, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEW VOICE.

"A MAN NAMED LUKE."

WELCOME IDEALISM.

(By NELLIE MACLEOD.)

In August, 1928, there issued from the Press of Simpkin, Marshall, Ltd., a small volume containing four allegorical stories bound together under the common title, "TJje Oldest Wish," and bearing the signature of "March Cost," which is the pen-name of Peggy Morrison, a Glasgow girl. Tho book was highly praised by all its reviewers, one of whom proclaimed his belief that it represented "a new voice in literature"; but as this voice, for all its sweetness, was "exceeding still and small," it did not bring to "The Oldest Wish" a very widespread fame.

Amid the desert of that bitter, and ruthless realism which had reached the height of its popularity about that time, "The Oldest Wish" was, to me, an oasis of life and beauty. The novelists and reviewers of that day were blatantly self-righteous in their professions of devotion to truth and reality, but if it be true that "the truth will set us free," much of their realism was a failure. They did not realise that the "right argument," however brilliantly expounded,' is futile without the "right spirit," that knowledge is dead and pity destructive if they are loveless, that purgatives are not a food, and they seemed to overlook the simple axiom that an atmosphere of nagging is an atmosphere of vice. Whatever we may profess to believe about the nature of reality, we are all (even the "highbrows") under the urgent necessity to live our lives, and are not likely to find that exacting task made any easier by a nagging realism. March Cost sees the complexity, the difficulty, and the sometime tragedy of life as subtly as any mere psycho-analyst, but her response to what she sees is active and creative, not passive and cynical. Her sympathy and , understanding are, indeed, best described as being maternal in iheir quality, for to her the gift of insight is a sacred possession, not to be prostituted to the display of cleverness or for mean uses of satire, but to be a lantern to the feet of humanity's purblind children. Ordeal by Pain. "It is worth while having lived, just to have received your letter," she wrote to one who had been inspired by "The Oldest Wish." Such is the spirit in which she labours, and 'labour" is not too strong a word for the case. March Cost lias been handicapped for years by ill-health. Her books have been written in the intervals between dangerous and painful illnesses. Yet she has remained an optimist. Optimism is precious in any realist, but it is particu-

larly precious in March Cost. Even R. L. Stevenson cannot have suffered more than she. He was probably never called upon to endure such intense pain, for there is nothing so agonising as operations for sinuses in the face. March Cost underwent nine of these, the last of which involved the removal of 27 polyps, and almost cost her her life. Later came two more, one of which was upon the eye, and caused excruciating agony. It is a miracle that this frail woman survived such ordeals, yet she did survive, and by carefully conserving her strength has been able to write "A Man Named Luke," which will probably prove her masterpiece.

"A Man Named Luke" is the garnered fruits of her own experiences in the hand of the surgeon, and of her wide reading in philosophy and psychology. It treats of the problems of pain and heavenly justicc. Her hero is Vincent Vincent, a surgeon who would have chosen to be an artist, had not his mind been impressed, in youth, with an unforgettable experience of pain. This memory rendered him incapable, even when a grown man and an established surgeon, of ever achieving that cool and dispassionate spirit towards all questions which is the natural prerogative of scientists. Moreover the suffering of "the diseased and defective," all those "defects ' of doubt" and "taints of blood" which he observed in the course of his work still further "queered the pitch for faith in heavenly justice." Yet even "the significance of human personality, bearing the appalling signature of suffering across the living face of it, was so vital to him that it impoverished something at his very source, to have to admit, as he did now, that probably it had no permanent value." Only by filling his time relentlessly with work could he ease this constant gnawing of could not solve. Reason and Intuition. His life might have been cited as a proof that reason and common kindness are sufficient guides to conduct. Ho lived his ideaL "One might be doomed eventually to duet, but while one lived to form a coherent pattern out of one's dealings with other souls, and to subdue one's own deliberately in this endeavour would mean at least a secret contribution to that invisible masterpiece, the ideal." At 35 he was at the head of his profession, rich and successful, loved by countless people he had helped and healed, revered by his colleagues. He was also unmarried,! for his taste was fastidious and work and art (his hobby) had entirely filled his life. Then, suddenly, and amazingly, the apparently feckless and absurd Phoebe-Ann Hopkins comes into his life, his love. She was his complement, for she lived entirely by intuition, blissfully unaware of laws of ethics and having, as her quaint father said, "no sense of continuity—being bat-blind to what's before and back of her." Vincent loved her, but was unconvinced by, and even hostile to, her powers of clairvoyance. She might have taught him faith, that

necessary "step in the dark," which seemed so natural to her, but death suddenly snatched her from him.

Years afterwards, Vincent, having worked himself to death's door, wonders whether after all her intuitions about life were true. Perhaps the mystics were right, and there were indeed, for those who would cultivate a special sense, "wordless approaches to the truth, avenues of light, vistas to the unknown." Perhaps if he had not lived too consciously on the iovver planes of his being; he too might have .received "intimations of immortality." Brooding thus in his chair he fails into a coma, and later dies. A Serious Purpose. How his soul passes out into the square, where he communes with the soul of the crossing-sweeper, who had died at the same hour, and how the crossing-sweeper reveals to him the meaning of pain and the purpose of life, is told in a prose-poem of marvellous beauty which rises in parts to almost scriptural heights of inspiration. Any description of life after death, must, by the very nature of it, be unsatisfying, but March Cost has given a singularly convincing picture of a soul's adventures from tile moment that it leaves the body untiKit passes out into space.

"A Man Named Luke" is, from both the literary and the philosophical viewpoint, a rare and exquisite creation. Its record success, for it is now in its sixth edition, will well reward its author for the spiritual and physical travail which its creation has cost her. It will suffer, in some hands, the inevitable fate of best-sellers, and be carelessly read for purposes of fashion or novelty. Like "The Oldest Wish, 1 " it contains more than can be gleaned in one or several readings, for it teems with wisdom, more of which lies between the lines than within them. In short, it is a novel with a serious purpose, and deserves to be read with a serious purpose.