OLD THEMES-NEW NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21650, 21 May 1932, Page 4

OLD THEMES-NEW NOTES

THE ART OF KATHLEEN O’BRIEN

" Our LlttU Life." Essays by Kathleen O’Brien. Illustrated by the Author. London: Methuen. ' v

It is fittipg that Miss _ Kathleen O’Brien's new volume should issue from the house of Messrs Methuen, for, as Mr ,T. L. Garvin, of the Observer, once remarked, (t E. V, Lucas is Methuen's. This is not to suggest that Miss O’Brien has been playing sedulous ape to the author of "Listeners’ Lure.” She has her own niche in contemporary letters, though she may not, as yet, command a very wide public. . Miss O’Brien has published two novels —"John Barbara and “The Mandeville Club.” .The former was awarded the medal of the Panton Arts Club. The president of the literary section of that organisation at the time was Mr John Drinkwater, and among the adjudicators was Mr Ernest Khys, editor of “ Everyman's '' series for Messrs Lent, John Lane undertook to publish the winning first novel for the Panton Club each year, and “ John Barbara appeared under the aegis of the “Bodley Head. It is a story in which actuality predominates over fantasy, but there is sufficient of the latter to please the reader m search of something that will pr° r “® r escape from his own circumstances. the Mandeville Club” has for its background a women’s club in London, and will appeal very readily to any reader who has ever lived and worked in the great centre, and possibly, more readily still, _ to any who are contemplating a .Dick Whitting* tonian pilgrimage to the home of so many enterprises. Both these novels are informed with the same spirit. Miss O’Brien is neither sentimentalist nor cynic, but dwells within these two extremes. She holds no Charter to be sentimental. That is Sir James Barnes prerogative. She is not merely a delicate iconoclaust like Rose Macaulay. In this latest volume of sketches, Our Little Life,” Miss O’Brien gives us, in more concentrated form, a taste of her humour and observation. _ The subjects of the various essays, which are embellished with illustrations by the author, range from golf to evolution. Mies O’Brien is a woman of her day, who writes of familiar things after the manner of one who conforms to every ordinance of man, or to most of them. She is no rebel, but she is fully alive .to the fact that life is a sorry compromise, and the best we can do is to extract what amusement we can from it, while at the same time avoiding the cloak of maliciousness. Some of the essays are slighter than others, and suggest an amplification of the causeries she conducted, in succession to the late Keble Howard, on the page ot the Sketch headed with a representation of Touchstone, and the caption Motley Notes." . . . ,

Mrs Potterthwaite Of the more carefully considered sketches, “ Mrs Potterthwaite and Evolution” indicates that the ’.voters observations are not merely the result of reading other essayists’ obiter dicta, blie is confronted by a lady with china blue eyes who declares, “ You know, dear, I do like to have a good cry at the pictures. ine authoress then indulges in a biological retrospect: "But I'was looking,.not at Mrs Potterthwaite; but a huge spiral nebula, like a fiery cloud whirling through an indescribable immensity of ether. I. saw the swirling, fiery cloud gradually, as a few million years slipped by, condense and concentrate and break up into a system of planets with unstable, incandescent surfaces, revolving in ever-widening orbits round the central, flaming sun. I saw one of those planets, its uncertain sphere lit by the fearful glare of the emerging solar system, rushing for uncounted aeons through space, seeking the orbit of natural stability between the gravitational .and centrifugal forces pulling and straining at its hardening centre. I watched its boiling, seething surfaces , condense and cool, shutting in its uneasy heat that sought perpetually, and sometimes found in an eruption of lava and flame, its way of escape. . . . I saw Mrs Potterthwaite appear. I should . never have recognised Mrs Potterthwaite in that minute, soft-bodied thing, that boneless and featureless speck of protoplasm. Alone in a desolation oP naked rock and stormy sea, swept by furnace blasts of terrible wind and, furious primeval rain, she seemed preposterously insignificant, utterly unrelated to the fierce and alien world into which she had been born. Yet, insignificant as she was, she had had the intelligence to arrange herself in that particular series of constituents, in that particular proportion and order of particles, in those specific conditions of temperature, moisture and density, by, the conjunction of which alone she was enabled to take • the mysterious," vital life current. I saw that vital current of which Mrs Potterthwaite was the supreme destination, . . . I saw her take her place among the Triassic reptiles, putting on a new skull plate and jawbone;' then, renouncing her reptilian relatives, refusing, because of this strange urge within her, to clinch a too-early specialisation, providing herself with a four-chambered heart, a wonderfully ingenious arterial system, a self-regulating mechanism for retaining the warmth of her blood at a mean temperature. I saw her experimenting with the forms of the first birds and the first mammals, trying them on and taking them off again, feeling her way towards something infinitely more adaptable, more pliant, more completely armed at. all points for self-preservation and survival. I watched her pass trembling into a shape of terror and evil as she swung with the great apes among dense tropical _forests, where large and fierce-eyed birds j with brilliant plumage screamed overhead, and fanged, sinister things writhed, and hissed beneath. I saw her emerge from that hateful purgatory among the most highlyorganised beings in the world,, the first true men. I saw her, her physical existence more evolved, ingenious, and concise, her capacity for experience more subtle and profound than, that of any other* living creature, groping henceforward towards a mind-life, attaining slowly a consciousness of her own ego. And when T had watched for millioios of years the miracle of Mrs Potterthwaite. when - 1 had seen how after aeons of striving aeainst circumstance she had acquired an individual intelligence, a social .sense,..a moral sense, I heard Mrs Potterthwaite “y, fixing her vacant china blua eyes on nothing in particular, ‘You know, dear, I do like to have a good cry at the pictures.’ Frankly, Evolution, was it worth it ? ”

Symphony of To-day • This passage, perhaps!, shows Miss O’Brien at the anti-seritimental extreme. “ The Rabbit,” in which she recounts how, as a golfer, she “ took on ” an unknown champion in a spirit of kindly condescension, and was badly beaten for her act of charity, is in a lighter and happier vein. “ The End of the Holidays' contains a description of the Sussex countryside under the influence of autumn that has been equalled only by Mr Kipling in that masterpiece among his short stories “They.” Space does not allow a quotation from Kipling, but here is a segment of Miss O’Brien’s picture: bar out a three-funnelled liner, steaming downchannel for the Atlantic, threw backwards a dark plume of smpke. Two fishing smacks were anchored in the bay. Ihere was the unmistakable September smell in the air; the sweet, warm-damp smell of grass and mould and trees, whose firm, strong life is slackening earthwards, and whose leaves will soon be beginning to fall. On the lawn in front of the house a fat brown thrush was holding a juicy worm that wriggled protesting m its beak. The late roses were still fresh and full in the centre bed: I could not remember a year when • they had been more perfect.” ... ~ All through the book, however, there runs a note of good sense which is very bracing in these days. Miss 0 Bnen has vet to be recognised as the peer of-such writers as Harold Nicholson, Robert Lynd or Osbert Sitwell. She has yet her public to capture. She brings -a, new note to the old themes. “ Our- Little - Life is not a metabiological pentateuch, but it is certainly a contribution to the symphony of to-day. It should be to the jaded scientist of to-day what A Corner in Harley Street ” was to the harassed intellectual of two decades back, a companion for some hour of ease when mere fiction will not serve. C. K. A. Centenaries This year is rich in centenaries and jubilees of famous men and women. In January the jubilee was observed in England of the death of William Harrison Ainsworth, novelist and antiquarian. March is Longfellow’s month; April is Darwin's, Rosetti’s and Emerson’s; July Hablot Knight Brown’s (“ Phiz ’): August. William Stanley Jevonss; and September is Dr Pusey’s (Oxford movement leader) month.