CONSTANCE HOLME

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22443, 2 July 1938, Page 18

CONSTANCE HOLME

The Novelist of Westmorland

(BTECXALLT WRITTEN FOB THE PRESS.) [By R. G. C. McNAB.]

“Fiction and the Reading Public.” bv Mrs Q. D. Leavis, is a depressing book. Mrs Leavis studied all available statistics and records for tht last 300 years and seemed to prove that popular taste, as indicated in the reading of novels, is steadily declining. But no one person can know all the facts about all novels, and a writer not mentioned by her provides one strong exception and shows that a good book cannot be kept down. A novel that fo 25 years sells more than 1000 copies a year is almost a best-seller; a d when it is a good novel the portent is cheering. Still more cheering is this result when the novelist has escaped nearly all commentators, the weekly paragynsts of the popular press, the Arnold Bennetts and the Sir Hugh Walpoles. Such has been the experience of Constance Holme. In a New Zealand small town, a holiday .resort, there is a well regarded book shop. One-third of the stock is the work of Constance Holme, who has been made known to many townspeople and visitors by a kind and zealous bookseller. A Stealthy Growth of Fame In February of this year a columnist of the New York “Saturday Review of Literature” said he was hunting for some one who had actually read some of Constance Holme’s novels. There was not space in the next ■ issue to print all the answers of enthusiasts. Most of the correspondents were persons of judgment, many of them professional readers and teachers. One university lecturer told how Constance Holme’s novels are now included in a university English course. Another quoted an unnamed authority who is said to have considered Constance Holme the most important living author of English prose fiction. A third recalled that Constance Holme was the first living author to be included in the Oxford University Press “World’s Classics” series. A fourth asked how her works escaped attention when they were first published and how they we£e rediscovered within the last few years. A fifth wrote, “While Miss Holme writes of a locality and its history, and of ideas and customs that no doubt are slowly passing away even there, the human quality of her characters is timeless.” A sixth announced that in a township of 5000 souls. Longmeadow, Massachusetts, there was a group of Holme “fans,” while the New York representative of the Oxford University Press reported that in England and America 35,000 copies of “The Lonely Plough” had been sold. Constance Holme is a Westmorland woman, wife of the agent for

the Bentinck Estates. She has written several novels and several plays. She is ‘ compared, rather superficially, with Thomas Hardy and Mary Webb, and, more generally, as a “regional” novelist, with Eden Philpotts and Quiller-Couch. A better comparison is with the George Eliot of “The Mill on the Floss.” With rather less humour than George Eliot, Constance Holme, like George Eliot, shows how circumstance and character combine in the fulfilment of destiny, how hard-won is the strength that makes human beings act for good or evil in a crisis. In both, characters are fully realised, with what is called consistent pschology. More definitely, the two greatest women created by these novelists, Maggie Tulliver and Sarah Thornthwaite, show how well both knew the terrible obstinacy of a placid woman roused by a passion at last consciously allowed expression. Both have the first and most obvious quality of a novelist, inventiveness, a quality scarcely to be found in the novel in these biographical and autobiographical days. The Pull of The Land

Constance Holme’s subject is Westmorland, the peasants and the farmers and squirearchy with whom she has lived. She knows best and is most moved by humble country people, whose life is an unbroken struggle in which men and women often fail. Men try to live by the soil; but many cannot come to terms and the supporting friend becomes a destroying enemy.

Man is .subdued to what he works in . . . The pull of the land, like the pull of the sea, is in our blood, and any townsman may hear it. Our own lads may wander, but somebody else’s will come back. And the need for loyalty remains—for honesty and straight dealing and confidence in our fellows. The land teaches these virtues, for it will be satisfied with nothing less.

From this intercourse or conflict proceeds the moral of her novels: personal responsibility, for “it is always one man’s work, always and everywhere.” Like her greatest predecessors. Constance Holme does not fear to allow her characters or herself to speak abstractly about matters of character and will, and this occasional didacticism, always serious and sincere, does not impair the interest or progress of the tale. Thus the chief character in “The Lonely Plough” says:

We drive our furrow single-handed, out of the dark into the dark, though we’ve got to reckon with the soil that others have left, just as others must reckon with our leavings after us. But it’s our job while we’re on it, all the same. It’s our job, while the light lasts, to make the best of it we can. It’s always one man’s hand bn the lonely plough.

Intimate Description But reflections of that kind are rare compared with the richness of intimate description. Sometimes the detail is unnecessary and illuminates the insignificant; but it is usually admirable. In one book there is an account of horse jumping at a country show. This passage is exciting and absorbing, not through the excitement of competition, but through the sure and knowing description of the horses and riders. One horse is “a boring chestnut with weak quarters and the action of a schoolboy in clogs.” Each horse and man is made known in temper and action and body. In the same way such events as a scratch hockey match, the election of a rural councillor, the performance of “Elijah” by a country choir become almost as real and quite as significant as if they were described by Jane Austen. Again, little things like the marks left by a bicycle on a polished wall or the distant song of a tipsy reveller have the same distinctness.

Sometimes the effect is of sound, as in the deserted cottage: “Where the kettle had sung and the tired dogs breathed in a happy sleep, the bitter water plashed and moaned.” Sometimes, the effect comes from a surprisingly swift image. A woman talked “with the objectless hurry of a cinema express; she shimmered along a permanent way of mazy speech.” Generally this power of close description is interpretative as well.

The kitchgn, once perfectly kept, was already beginning to show signs of Sarah’s failing sight. There were holes in the cloth rug which she unrolled before the fire, and slits in the patch-work cushions on the rushbottomed chairs. The pots in the halfempty pot-rail were all askew, and the battered pewter and brass had ceased to put in their claim to be silver and gold. There was an out-of-date almanac under the old clock, and an ancient tide-table over the mantleshelf. But the real tragedy of the place was not in its poverty, but in its soul. Behind the lack of material comfort there was a deeper penury still — the lack of hope and a forward outlook, and a reason for going on. The place was cold because the hearts of its tenants were growing cold. Inevitability In “The Lonely Plough” and “The Spendid Fairing” tragedy comes to catastrophe through the sea. In each an old man and his wife, worn down by the enmity of the soil and by the obduracy or hostility of kinsfolk, are released from the bondage of miserable reality by the sea, against which the soil can no longer resist. Over the events and persons of both stories there hangs that sense of doom which makes “Anna Karenina” such a terrible book. Sometimes the disaster is suspected, its nature not known. In the passage from “The Splendid Fairing” just quoted, a hint of the tragedy comes from the harmless words, “an ancient tide-table.” Two quotations will show the power of this novel. An old woman whose husband had been defeated endured the bitterness of the contempt and enmity of a stupid but well-established kinswoman. Beaten down by poverty, blindness, and despair, her pride and independence concentrated themselves in hatred.

The flame of hate burnt steadily but without effort, and with almost as pure a light as the flame of love itself. Like all great passions, it lifted her out of herself, lending her for the time being a still, majestic strength. There is little to choose at the farthest point of all between the exaltation of holiness and the pure ecstasy of hate. To the outside eye they show the same shining serenity, almost the same air of smiling peace. It is the strangest quality in the strange character of this peculiarly self-destroying sin.

The suffering woman, thus inspired, had the chance of destroying her enemy’s son, a son who loved herself better than his mother, and who was able and willing to relieve her of her miseries. She chose to gratify hatred and not love.

She had, as she came back within range of feeling again, one last, great moment of exultant pride. She seemed to herself actually to grow in size, to tower in the low room as the shadow of the homecomer had towered over ceiling and wall. Into the hands of this oppressed and poverty-stricken woman there had suddenly been given the heady power of life and death, and the stimulant of it was like wine in her thin blood, making her heart steady as a firm-blown forge. She felt strong enough in that moment to send every child of Eliza’s out to its death in the maw of the night wave. She felt an epic figure poised on the edge of the world, heroic, tremendous, above all laws. Indeed she seemed to be the very Finger of God itself.

It is difficult to decide how good a novelist Constance Holme is. She is certainly much' superior to the Cronins, Maxwells, and Allens of our day, whose works fill the libraries and bookshops of England and America in a few weeks. Few novelists have written with the intensity and assured knowledge of Constance Holme; her range is narrow, but her understanding deep; her instrument is not as strong as her intention, and she verges sometimes upon the purple pseudopoetry of Blackmore; she evidently writes so quickly that she passes blemishes which thought would remove. But there are power, substance, and emotion in her work, abundant for her purpose and sufficient to supply a score of more popular contemporaries.