LITERATURE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3673, 5 August 1924, Page 66

LITERATURE.

BOOK NOTICES. “Harbottle : A Modern Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to that Which isto Come.” By John Hargrave. (London : Duckworth and Company.) This appears to be a first novel, and, assuring it to be so, readers of the more thoughtful class may congratulate themselves on the appearance of a novelist with ideas and power to weave them into a life-like story. Fiction should take the whole of human life for its province. We live in an age of tremendous movements and thronging problems. Never was life so full as it is, or may be, to-day. Never have those who desire to write fiction had such varied aspects of human life open to them; never was there so much call for imaginative writers able to express the needs of their time, and impart some inspiration which may help suffering humanity. But the great mass of fiction-writers, men and women, confine themselves within a very limited range of human interest, keeping for the most part along stereotyped lines. The great bulk of novels published fall within the headings of love stories and stories of romantic adventure by land or sea, and are written for people who do not want to think, but to be amused or thrilled for an hour or two. When these are fairly written and wholesome they are very well justified; still, one might expect more writers to recognise that the human heart has many emotions and the human soul many adventures with which sex attraction in any form has little or nothing to do. The psychology of Freud and his following has conduced, with other factors, in the social life of to-day to make sex an obsession, and to impel novelists to do velop the sex interest in disproportionate degree and unelevating manner. Love and sex relations find very small place in Mr Hargrave’s novel, and they are treated on a higher plane than is usual in “modern” writers. Mr Hargrave’s new pilgrim sets forth, like Bunyan’s, carrying on his back a load of sin, but it is not sin in the evangelical sense; he is fleeing from no wrath to fall on himself, but wandering in hopes of finding some ray of light which may guide him and his fellows out of the labyrinth in which all are blindly groping. He feels himself a sinner ; he shares the sins of slackness, wilful ignorance, narrowness, and inertia that involved the world in the Great War and left social ills to develop unchecked. The book is largely filled with his reflections, after the following manner :—“l’m the sinner. There’s a burden of sin on my back. The sin of hesitation ; tried and found wanting in imagination to get things straight. The sin of listlessness and mental inertness; the sin of not knowing and of not really bothering to find out; general hesitation, slackness, and ignorance about every mortal tiling—that’s my son, my personal sin that belongs to me and to all those other human Harbottles who go about their daily work. ’ ’ Harbottle, who is in early middle life at the outbreak of the war, has two sons just old enough to take part in it. At the commencement of the story he receives a telegram telling him of the death of the younger, barely 19. At the same time Harbottle (who had pre viously offered himself unsuccessfully) is called up, and goes to Egypt, where he is employed as camp postman. Just .as the war ends he gets news of the death of his eldest son. When discharged he goes home to find an empty house and a letter from his wife telling him she has gone off with another man. Now the boys are gone there is nothing to keep them together, and she wants happiness. There is much power in the presentment of Harbottle alone in his deserted house through the night, his mind half-stunned by the last. blow. After a policeman (attracted by the light in a supposedly empty house), the local vicar is his first visitor, and in his jovial, booming voice he bids Harbottle not to brood —remember his boys died for England—come and have a rubber some eveping. After some days Harbottle, sleepless- and broken, packs a rucksack. “I-must get out of it,’’ he says, and wanders forth. He feels no anger against the Huns or the Kaiser for having killed his boys nor against his wife for having deserted him. “Why shouldn’t she go off ? She may be right. I daresay I was cold and disinterested and absorbed in the Echo. Very likely—l’m not so sure about it.” All Mr Harbottles reflections end thus : he is sure of nothing.

The various people with whom he falls in during his wanderings are vividly presented. First there is the excessively eccentric and ill-tempered landscape painter Sheppstone, who scornfully repudiates Harbottle’s suggestion that art has any message for humanity. He paints because he likes it: he pleases himself, and advises Harbottle to do the same Thinking is fatal; it leads nowhere. A simple rustic who has lost a son in the war, a scientific friend who has suffered in it, and his sister who is trying fo make life one long jazz, another friend who has lost his wife and found solace in Spiritualism, an • anthropologist who studies primitive religions, two amusinglydescribed simple-lifers who believe in fairies and preach right thinking, a Red Revolutionist, a Masonic acquaintance who unwillingly puts Harbottle in the way to investigate the inner meaning of Masonry, a good-hearted, mindless young land-owner who acts the Good Samaritan when Harbottle has broken his leg in a rabbit-hole on his estate—these and others all are interrogated by Harbottle. One and all alike, though in various ways, they are absorbed in their personal views and interests. Most of those who have suffered bereavement seem to have thrown off their grief easily; none has learnt any lesson from the war. “Don’t think; just do your duty,” says one. Those who are devoted to intellectual pursuits have no conception of any unifying idea

in the light of which men may co-operate for world improvement. Early in his wanderings Harbottle picks up a discarded atlas, and it becomes to him a smybol which he carefully carries about with him. It represents genuine effort, true knowledge ; it is something certain to hold by. After seeking light for some weeks in the mysteries of esoteric Masonry and Kabbalism, he revolts against their futile jargon, and later seeks light in studying the records of human progress preserved in the British Museum. He spends months in examining its treasures, and light breaks in upon him. He realises the evolution of humanity. He sees the same basal idea variously expressed by human beings in different stages of evolution, and grasps the idea of a great whole slowly evolving. And God is evolving in the universe. The task of each human unit, he sees, should be to promote the sense of human unity, and aid the human race in its slow progress upward. Absorption in individual or national aims hinders that progress; all passion and vindictiveness are futile. Discouragement comes; but he does not wholly lose the light, though life does not last for him to work by it. The book is an intensely human one, and many people who are not attracted by its thought may read it with pleasure for the sake of its realistic pathos, its graphic character sketches, and its lively detail. And many must sympathise in Harbottle’s bewilderment and exasperation at the blindness of those who should be guides, the multiple stiams and short cuts offered in place of genuine thought and purposeful endeavour. The character of Harbottle is decidedly reminiscent of Mr Hutchinson’s Mark Sabre. “Be Good, Sweet Maid.”. By Anthony Wharton, author of “ Irene Wycherley,” “At the Barn,” etc. (T. Fisher Unwin.) “Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever,” is Charles Kingsley’s counsel to the young girl. Laura Strong, Mr Wharton s heroine, prefers to be clever rather than good. 1’ rom childhood people characterised her as clever, and she developed her cleverness in unpleasant fashion, neither dreaming nor doing lovely things, and certainly despising virtues of the sweet maidenly order. But, then, Nature had not made tier sweet to start with, had, indeed, handicapped her heavily for any pursuit after happiness in which traditional feminine charms help to win. Her sister Eva grew up both sweet and good, though not monotonously one or the other ; but then she was a lovely, graceful girl, while Laura was unusually plain in face and clumsy in figure. Embittered by her younger brother’s thoughtless gibes at ner ugly nose and shapeless legs she early registered a vow: “I’ll show them!” She would show her superiority; would flout the Victorian prejudices and elegancies still honoured, if not held to, practically by the little world around her. The book is a satiric attack on novelists who seek fame and financial success by pandering to the taste for morbid, sensuous, and openly indecent fiction; and Laura Strong is Mr Wharton’s idea of the feminine writer of such fiction. According to Mr Wharton, both men and women writers of to-day are, tor the most part, an ill-looking, shabby lot. “ But beside the plainness of the female of the kind, the blurred symmetry of the male contrives to counterfeit a certain passable decency.” Publishers’ portraits of women novelists are so ugly as to call forth masculine sniggers, and “when people encounter a real and original woman author in the flesh they realise how much more dismaying the flesh can be than any photograph.’’ Thus Mr Wharton. The reviewer thought that the old idea that associated ugliness and dowdiness with feminine cleverness and literary ambition had died out; and the portraits of women writers in 'the Bookman and other literary journals certainly do not bear out Air Wharton’s strictures. At school Laura is unpopular, and does not shine in most studies, but she discovers her power with the pen, anil on leaving school sets herself to develop it. As an exercise in the writer’s craft she translates Flaubert’s novel “Madame Bovary,” and writes short stories and verses.' Then she plans a long novel, but discouragement at the perceived inanity of her plot, and then her mother’s death, make her lay aside her pen for a time. Then early in 1914 she sets-to again an a novel, which is to be social comictragedy, mostly dialogue, in imitation of Gyp. And she has discovered that the simplest way to make her dialogue amusing is to make it rather indecent. She submits the finished work to a literary authority, who frankly pronounces it a farrago of irreverence, immorality, and general inanity, but nevertheless puts her in tlve way of having it produced by a publisher, “ who’ll le’p ai it, the swine!” But the war prevents the immediate publication of Laura’s “ monstrosity,” as her candid critic calls it, and when it finally appears it is her third. The publisher to whom it is offered asks her tc write another, bringing in war interests. And when it s written he wants her to alter it, and 10 “ginger it up.” And Laura- does “ ginger it up ” to a degree somewhat surprising to her literary agent Her literary labours are varied by a few weeks’ V.A.D. work in an officers’ hospital, where she is indiscreetly zealous and thoroughly unpopular. During the war she marries an ineffectual young man of blameless character, between whom and Laura the only point of affinity is literary interest—he is writing a play. It is desire for experience rather than any heart promptings that make her marry him; she is the active partner in the courtship, in which and in her married life Air Wharton shows her in tire most unpleasant light—indeed, lie lias not avoided the unsavouriness of the school of fiction he satirises.

Unpleasant as is the portrait of Laura, it does not strike one as a caricature. Mr Wharton allows her some good qualities, a constitutional truthfulness, readiness to do kind actions, freedom from much feminine pettiness. She often compels sympathy. But while not thoroughly heartless, she is wholly selfcentred, bent before all on asserting herself, and compelling regard of some quality. She has no ideas, no power of plot-weaving; but she has literary faculty, and perceiving that this 'is not sufficient to command popularity she relies on sensuousness and suggestiveness. In an introductory chapter Mr Wharton pictures the stream of visitors to a circulating library—men and women who come seeking literary dope. Some of the dope is the good old yarn that lasts for ever, some is innocuous drivel, some is the poison of Miss Strong and her like. The book is a clever and well-written, but not a pleasant, one; it could hardly be so with its motive and its heroine, and Air Wharton writes with too much’ animus. As a successor to Air Wharton’s last-year novel, “ The Alan On the Hill,” the present novel is rather disappointing. “Three Rooms.” By Warwick Deeping. (Cassell and Company.) Air Warwick Deeping is a practised novelist, and in “Three Rooms” he contrives to give some freshness to familiar character types and hackneyed situations. The scene is laid on the Mediterranean coast of France,• and the “three rooms” are numbers 37, 38, and 39 of the hotel in which the mother and daughter of the story and Byron Byrne, another chief character, are staying. Mrs Shell-drake is scheming to capture the wealthy middleaged Max Rubenstein, but he prefers her 18-year-old daughter Fifne, who, in defiance of her mother, puts up her hair and blossoms out as a charming grownup young lady. Airs Shelldrake, who is impecunious and in debt to the landlady, falls ill, and is about to be turned out of the hotel when Alax Rubenstein comes to the rescue and finally strikes a bargain with her for the hand of her daughter. But Fifine, who is innocent and unspoiled, is also spirited, and she leaves her mother and takes a situation as parlourmaid to an old English lady. But before this the somewhat moody and recluse Byrne has fallen in love with Fifine. Pie is banished to the Mediterranean coast owing to lung weakness, and is brooding over his spoilt career and thinking himself much more of an invalid than he really is. But Fifine first piques him, and then stimulates him to make life worth living within conditions imposed by fortune. He seeks independence and health by setting to work on a little garden and poultry farm. And he does not long have to wait in solitude. Three of John Long’s Reprints.— 1. “Thanks to Sanderson,” by W. Pett Ridge. (Half-crown Library).—W. Pett Ridge’s bright and humorous presentments of ordinary people and ordinary domestic interests Have a never-failing charm, and it is satisfactory to find this pleasant story of his reproduced in the excellent form of Mr John Long’s Half-crown Library edition. 2. “The Sins Ye Do,” by Emmeline Alorrison.—Emmeline Alorrison was the winner three or four years ago of the John Long £SOO prize for the best first novel, and she has continued to exploit the attractions of illicit love and divorce suits, etc., very successfully, as the reprinting of this story shows. 3. “A Great Surprise,” by Nat Gould.—■ One of Nat Gould’s most 'spirited racing stories, with the usual love interest interwoven. Their charm seems still strong for a very large class of readers, besides the attraction of their main subject to people interested in horses and the turf,they have the merits of rapid movement and a clear, straightforward style, while the atmosphere is decidedly more wholesome than that of the common sex novel of to-day. These last two stories belong to Air Long’s 2s series.