by Rebecca West. New York: George H. Doran Co. 1922. 12mo. 491 pp. $2.50.
THIS novel is a very interesting example of the fatality in fiction of a thesis that is false. And this thesis Miss Rebecca West is not content with propounding in her text and in her title; she has even nailed it up before her first page. ‘Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of the father.’ Not so, thank Heaven! It would be nearer the truth to say, ‘Every mother is a judge who pardons the children for the sins of the father.’ Did she not, this poor human race would long since have digged its own grave.
The attempt to depict a mother who has suffered insult and injury, as a necessary instrument in the doom of her children, thus fails at every crucial moment, from the instinctive dissent of the reader. Not all the book’s splendid texture — for it is splendid — can save it. It is extraordinary that Miss West, who obviously knows her sources, and has given us in the mother, Marion Yaverland, all the stigmata of the unsatisfied, mentally wounded female, has yet sought to present her not as the rapacious creature she is, devouring her children for the feast of life she has missed, but as a martyr and a sacrifice. (Every mother, forsooth! Rather might every mother read the book as a warning of the insidious encroachments of passionate love on a child’s personality.) Because the moral values are all wrong, the intended emotional effects do not ‘come off.’ As a novel, The Judge fails.
Nevertheless the essential falsity in the meaning of the book cannot destroy its delightful qualities. As Miss West herself wrote of another novel, ‘ Take it ... as a portfolio, and it is indubitably precious.’ It is full of exquisite matter: intense, crystal-clear word-pictures, strange, revealing metaphors, arrow-swift fixations of some spiritual phase. Vivid and touching and yet solid with truth is the original creation of Ellen Melville who, to the experiencing temperament, and loving common-sense, adds that unusual possession of a heroine — a mind. One would like to repeat to Miss West of her book what R. L. S. said of Richard Feverel, that it began to end well, and ought to have gone on so. One would like to sentence her to throw away her Frankenstein-monster of the mother, and to continue the fresh, moving, authentic story of Ellen Melville, than whom no more delightful person has been met by this reader for many a long day.
ETHEL PUFFER HOWES.