Memoirs of a Midget
by . New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1922. 8vo, iv + 436 pp. +3.00
‘SMALLEST of bubbles I might be, tossing on the great waters, but I reflected the universe.’ So Walter de la Mare’s Midget epitomizes herself in her Memoirs! Smallest of bubbles, too, is a review of five hundred words, yet it must reflect, the universe of a masterpiece precious alike for its perfection and its poignancy. Physically, this world is as alive, as complete, as the ice and snow universe of the Three Mulla Mulgars. Spiritually, a world only hinted at there is here unfolded. But it is a universe — that is the marvel. In few of the books that form our literary heritage is this end sought, much less achieved. Many of the most admirable are, essentially, as the illumination of a small surface under the glare of a spot light. In Walter de la Mare’s pages the wonder is brought to pass by our looking out upon life through the windows of the Midget’s soul. Thus seen, people and events are measured by a common scale, are unified on the basis of their human worth. With a passion intense, yet balanced, she desires to think of others merely as human beings, and to be so thought of herself.
The events of an English twelvemonth in town and country (forming for the reader a story of engrossing interest, memorable for its pictures and its people, and mounting in the last hundred pages to an incomparable climax) teach the Midget the human tragedy of our inequality of soul. Mrs. Bowater, the lovesick curate, the sinister and malignant Fanny, who wins from the reader an abhorrence such as he gives to few characters in fiction, Mrs. Monnerie, with her knickknacks and curios (the Midget one of them), the showman of the Kentish circus, dear Sir Walter, and, last, the Midget’s mate in size, with his upbraidings and his devotion — through her commerce with these, from their love and their contempt, Miss M—— learns by threads of what varying strength mortals maintain communication with humanity. For, before we own allegiance to the common lot, our whim is to be recognized as belonging to the Great or the Small, the Strong or the Weak, and we make parade of the antipathy born of a narrower loyalty. We Giants, can we reach out, with understanding sympathy, to the sick, the little, the frail; or is it true, as Mr. Anon bitterly exclaims of us, that we have neither love nor pity for them? And we Midgets, do we dread and abhor the Giants, with their masses of flesh, their ‘quarts and quarts of blood,’ and see them only as monsters of coarseness and rapacity? In such an existence, filled with wars of powers and sizes, no unity may be conceived; we are but broken bubbles. Salvation lies for us, as for Miss M——, in remembering each other, ‘not with scorn or even pity, but as if, life for life, we had shared the world on equal terms.’
Searching and true is the reflection of the universe in the sphered soul of the Midget; the more intent the reader’s gaze the greater his joy, for he finds deeps within deeps. The style, too, has a bubble’s perfection of texture, radiance, and color. Sentences, pages, whole chapters cause us to catch our breath: we turn the leaves back a second, a third, time to submit ourselves to the spell of a magic phrase. Evanescent and entrancing as the film of the bubble, which is also its substance, the style, like the universe reflected in it, has the beauty which endures.
HENRY G. PEARSON.