The Books of Mary Webb

THE death of Mary Webb put an end to the development of an extraordinary gift for which ‘talent’ is a tepid name. Her art is no perfect thing; its limitations and flaws are obvious. But it is ‘a door to new worlds in the brain,’for unquestionably she had something her own to give to the world. Her passion for the earth and its beauty was a fire, and the fineness of her observation, the sensitiveness of her responses, must be a revelation to many a reader who has fancied his own eye and his own heart quick.

’The love of nature,’ she writes in The House in Dnnnrr Forest, ‘is a passion for those in whom it once lodges. It can never be quenched. It cannot change. It is a furious, burning, physical greed, as well as a state of mystical exaltation.’ She was free, however, from the sentimentalism into which the lover of nature may so easily fall, She saw an earth terrible as well as beautiful; but she loved it with an insight of passion that makes dearer to the reader what is already dear to him, or wakes him to some beauty unperceived.

Mary Meredith, later Mrs. H. B. L. Webb, was born, and lived much of her life, in Shropshire, and her work is steeped in the spirit of that enchanted land, where in the lonely places the sense of the ancient past and of some presence not seen iv like a touch. The name of a greater magician is so linked to that of Shropshire that it is impossible to think of the region as treated in art without thinking of him; and the fact that one can have in mind that stern power and that matchless swift conjuring of beauty, and still own the gentle wizardry of Mary Webb, is the highest tribute to her power and her originality.

As a novelist, she matured slowly. To compare the earlier tales with those finer pieces of work, Precious Bane and the unfinished Armour Wherein He Trusted, is to guess regretfully at what she might yet have done. Nevertheless the earlier novels have qualities that hold the reader absorbed. In The House in Dormer Forest it is true that the author’s philosophy is less implicit; her reflections upon human life are not lightly touched in, as in the other novels,but halt the tale here and there, sometimes with a slightly didactic effect. But they reveal the more pungent parts of her mind: her keenness in distinguishing the shadow from the substance, her scorn of herd thinking, her hatred of" tyranny by stupidity. Seven for a Secret, though its climax would be hard to match for preposterousness, has an agreeable crispness and briskness; anti in the most mystical of the novels. The Golden Arrow, it is as if, from time to time, a sweet elusive air were played on a harp far away. In all of these tales can be found examples of an almost childish ingenuousness in characterization, psychology, or incident. But all have a strong vitality, and a skill in the portrayal of relationships that surpasses their portrayal of character; all have the half-poetic, half-comic charm of the dialect; and the lyric beauty of what cannot be called the setting, for it is rather the essence and the soul of each book.

Precious Bane is the strongest and bestrounded of the pastoral novels. Story and background are more perfectly welded; there is less insistence upon the power of natural beauty, but the whole book is a hymn to earth. The technique has attained new firmness. The theme, the destruction of young Gideon Sara by avarice, as a field is ruined by a noxious weed, is treated with a sternness of simplicity; and the climax, the burning of the barley-ricks that are the fruit of all Sarn’s hardness to himself and to others, is the high-water mark of Mary Webb’s power in narrative. It is told, as all the story is told, in the words of Sarn’s sister Prue, the girl with the ’hare-shotten lip,’who is the most fully drawn of Mary Webb’s characters. Prue’s story of the fire is a lyric cry. ‘There was no barley,’ she says. ‘Where it had been were two great round housen made of white fire, very fearful to see, being of the size and shape of the stacks. . . . I looked at those two abodes of demons . . . and remembered the barley, oh, the sweet barley, rustling in the wind of dawn! I called to mind the ploughing for it, in such good behopes, and the sowing of it ... a thing I dearly loved to see. For reaping, though it is good to watch as be all the year’s doings on a farm, is a grutching and a grabbing thing compared with sowing.’ In the judgment that Prue pronounces upon her dead brother there is the same eloquence of simplicity: ‘Though he was wrong, and did evil, and hurtid folks by his strength, yet he never did meanly, nor turned out bad work, nor lied.'

Armour Wherein He Trusted, left unfinished at the writer’s death, is an experiment in a wholly different manner. In this tale of Sir Gilbert Polrebec. who left bis love Nesta to go crusading for the love of Christ, she has wrought a rhythmical archaic style that wraps the story in enchantment. For its rich weaving of beauty, this romance has inevitably been likened to a tapestry. But in the simile is no suggestion of the smell of the forest, the glancing of sunlight, or the wetness of flew on Long-mynd. The book has a May freshness that brings a swift sense of Chaucer. ‘God bless the thorn!' sings young Sir Gilbert as he rides ‘in the fair green weather.’ And he says, ’I mind how at Pontesford above the mill was a great may-tree like the mercy of God. spread everywise, and doubled in the pool.’ That Mary Webb was finding narrative in the first person her best method of characterization is perhaps a hasty conclusion. But it is certain that the portrait of the young knight, lusty, unregenerate, and devout, has, like that of Prue Sarn, a most engaging reality: and it adds vigor and humor to the poetry of the lovely fragment.

The subjectivity of the poems and of the essays entitled The Spring of Joy reveals more minutely the original and intensely living personality that is felt behind the novels. The essays, written as they are for a special class, those who need the comfort, that earth can give, are frankly selective. They are in different keys, but all deal with the beauty yielded by sky, wood, and meadow, or the healing mirth provided by the comedies of animal life. ‘The little creatures of earth are the court jesters of those that dwell in the hall of sorrow,’ says Mary Webb. And she pictures the accusatory stare of the two baby owls on the beech bough across the moon, the madness of the baby hedgehogs rushing in circles in the moonlit field, with the same deft hand that sketches in the novels the drolleries of farm animals. Other essays, dealing with the joy of form, of motion, of color, unite an extraordinary fineness of observation with a mystical sense of beauty. But from all is excluded the dark aspect of earth and of human life that the author acknowledges elsewhere. Her power of construction is best shown in this book, for in it she lays hold upon the spirit of rhapsody and moulds it into pure form without brushing the least radiance from its wings. But in the poems, technically less even, the whole of her is found. They speak her ever-renewed worship of beauty, her gloating glee — almost as of an imp in hiding - in her sequestered country life, her kindliness spiced with humor, her depth and frankness of emotion. But her philosophy of life was based on no facile, all-simplifying faith. A sense of cosmic sadness underlay her instinctive joy: and sombre depths are sometimes revealed, now in the gossamer delicacy of ‘ Like a Poppy on a Tower’ and now in the grimness of the rather terrible little lyric called ‘The Door.’

In the poems can often be heard a momentary echoing, far from conscious imitation, of other poets. The faint, half-familiar cadence floats past, sometimes too swiftly to be grasped, adding an elusive grace without destroying individuality. Many verses have a curious charm, not easily analyzed but lingeringly felt, as these from the little lyric describing a thought: —

But of all the poems ’Viroconium is the most memorable in its austere simplicity and its spaciousness, and in its distilling of that impalpable thing, a quiet that is haunted. The solemn and beautiful verses move enchanted by the spell that was Mary Webb’s own — the spell that she learned in the lonely Shropshire hills.

ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS

The following volumes by Mary Webb have already been published by E. P. Dutton and Company: Precious Bane, Seven for a Secret. Gone to Earth. The House in Dormer Forest. Armour Wherein He Trusted. Poems and The Spring of Joy. The Golden Arrow is announced for publication during the autumn. Each volume, $2.50.