Criticism of Life

MARY ROSS, an editor of the Survey, has threaded together for us her impressions of four spring novels, each of which makes an interesting evaluation of Western life.

Pageant is the quality as well as the name of G. B. Lancaster’s spirited story of the settling of Tasmania (Century, $2.50). Pageant of pioneers who came, not like the Pilgrim fathers, each with his acres to wrest from forest and Indians, but as gentlemen with their land already their own and a thousand convict slaves to do their bidding. Pageant of a country of outlaw raids on great houses; of a country growing in self-consciousness and awkward new strengths, divided in rebellion against the yoke of empire, fighting for trade against the Yankee clipper ships and the golden lure of neighboring Australia. The book is the saga of two pioneer families, especially of Captain Comeyn, who had fought with His Majesty’s forces through the Napoleonic Wars, and Madam Comeyn, born Du Nesle, married at fourteen, and determined that this new land should give due place to the sons and daughters of a great lady. The story starts with the ten months on the little schooner which the Captain and Major Sorley chartered in 1826 to carry their families and themselves to claim the fifteen hundred acres granted each of them by the Crown. It follows on through the generation of Madam’s sons, gentlemen lost in the rough-and-tumble of the new land, to the early years of the twentieth century, when honors came to the Comeyns after the close of Madam’s ninety-four years through the marriage of a great-granddaughter to a beer baronet. Threedimensioned, usually vivid in both background and characterization, Pageant is a romance of quality, at once exciting and plausible.

Sylvia Thompson’s sixth novel, Unfinished Symphony (Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown, $2.50), shows a situation just opposite to that of Pageant. In the latter, ladies and gentlemen who are the flower of their day’s civilization are transplanted to a wilderness; in Unfinished Symphony a lovely ‘barbarian ’ is cast into what we call civilized society. When Sir Lawrence Marvell, successful sardonic playwright, cut himself loose of the web of social ambition which his wife had spun around him and their two elder children, he took his four-year-old daughter Helena with him to an island in the Mediterranean. She was not to know, even through contemporary novels, the foundation of hypocrisy, greed, and ignorance on which he believed the modern world built esteem. Helena grew up like Prospero’s Miranda, surrounded by refinements of custom and the distilled wisdom of the ages in philosophy, literature, and art. The story starts as she is brought back to England at the death of her father, a clear-eyed girl who had not talked since babyhood with a woman of her own class, who knew men only through her father and the occasional chance visits of his friends.

This situation gives Miss Thompson an opportunity for witty satire of the smug upper classes, which she uses to admirable advantage. The story, however, goes deeper than satire. Helena is an appealing picture of what youth might be without the petty limitations that the elders have laid on it for their own purposes. The girl had to undergo several severe shocks in realizing the conditions which any society places on those who would share in it, the greatest of these the discovery that her way of life could not be that which her father had taken — flight front what troubled him. Under the terms of the going world, her first love affair was one which could not end in marriage and her solution shows how a wholehearted woman may meet acknowledged disaster. It will be interesting to readers this side of the Atlantic to see that Helena found in an American woman, Mrs. Raeburn, the embodiment of really civilized personality — wisdom and strength to move in one’s world without self-delusion or cringing; it was an American, Mrs. Raeburn’s nephew, whom she finally married. In both matter and manner Miss Thompson has carried still further in this book the accomplishments and anticipations inherent in her earlier novels.

Evaluation of life, which is expressed concretely by Miss Lancaster and Miss Thompson in the aims and actions of their characters, finds a symbolic form in tales by Robert Nathan and Bernard Shaw. Mr. Nathan’s story, One More Spring (Alfred A. Knopf, $2.00) is an idyll of the depression, the chronicle of a bankrupt dealer in antiques, a violinist, a ruined banker, and a lady of unconventional virtue who found shelter fur a winter in a toolshed in Central Park and occasionally added to their scanty larder by abstracting eggs (once even a pig) from the black-and-white farm of the New York Zoo. The book brings to bear on the acknowledged miseries of the depression a quality I have not met elsewhere in print: gentle and imaginative irony, without flippancy or callousness. A smooth and distinguished piece of writing, One More Spring has also a perspective which gives without evasion one kind of answer to the troubles of these times.

Mr. Shaw’s little book. The Adventures of the Block Girl in Her Search for God (Dodd, Mead, $1.50), comes to this country after some weeks of notable success in England. It is a reversal of the usual Shaw Formula of the long explanatory preface followed by the play. First comes the brief tale of the black girl, convert of a Christian missionary in Africa, who set out through the jungle to look for God and found in turn the Gods of Noah, Job, and Jesus, and also the idols modern peoples have fashioned to explain their needs. Then follows a postscript half as long as the tale, in which the author explains that he had meant to write a play, but that the story came instead, and tells what it means to him — a ‘curious and sudden inspiration ... a message at the present world crisis.’ The Shaw of this book is the Shaw we have known of old, laying about him with a rapier and a bludgeon and toppling idols from their clay feet with a dexterity that makes it hard to resist quotation. But this is also a Shaw who says, ‘Mere agnosticism leads nowhere.’ Here is the apologia of a man who has been singularly sensitive to the spirit of his times, intolerant of stupidity and cruelty wherever he found it, but quick to honor kindness and wisdom. We see the jester who rings his bells and casts out quips to prick understanding of what to him are the issues of life and death. These seventy-five pages of text interwoven with the distinguished designs of John Farley offer a thoughtful reader an evening not often to be matched in magnanimity as in provocativeness.

MARY ROSS