PROBLEMS OF MENTAL UNREST

Henry Brinsley

They Form the Basis of Many of the Recent Novels, of which the Underlying Motives are Intellectual Rather than Dramatic

THE small group of novels that I have read at random the past month have, unexpectedly, a common note of mental unrest—the underlying motive of each is primarily an intellectual one as distinguished from a dramatic; and although in the working out of these several problems the authors range from joyous adventure to emotional intrigue, the central theme in each case focuses itself upon some peculiarly interesting mental state. There is, then, in each book necessarily a somewhat exceptional concentration: the characters are few, the reasoning is close-knit. And such novels demand from the reader a corresponding concentration of attentiveness, which, fortunately, one is better able to give them in indoor December than in warmer, sunnier months. Fortunately, too, each book will in a good measure repay this attentiveness.

For once I am not inclined to cavil much at the publishers' description of Mrs. de Selincourt's new novel, "The Encounter," as "of original and daring plot, and of the subtle character drawing and exquisite workmanship which mark Anne Douglas Sedgwick's writings." Each phrase of this, however, requires some explanatory qualification. The plot— three German philosophers contending for the love and intellectual discipleship of a young American girl—is "daring" partly because the suitors' Teutonic lovemaking is wrapped up in a mass of philosophic subtleties and subtly specious egocentricities, but more because the chief philosopher, the other two being his friends and in a sense pupils, is none other than Nietzsche himself, here thinly disguised under the name of Ludwig Wehlitz. Mrs. de Selincourt was undoubtedly led to make this "daring" attempt at fictional portraiture by a similar, almost parallel experiment of Meredith's in "The Tragic Comedians." But fate has played her a quaintly cruel trick in that recent bellicose happenings which she could not foresee while writing the book have given to the figure of Nietzsche such an infamously stupendous, even if momentary, importance that her portrait which might have been satisfactory in a time of less stress, now seems almost pathetically trivial.

TN her character drawing Mrs. de Selincourt had a difficult problem to adjust. Mr. Hewlett, in "Bendish," had, with Byron, a great figure who lent himself better to the purposes of narrative portraiture than does Nietzsche. The chief interest in Byron as a personality, a genius complex of vanity and sentimentality, is his romantic career, and is therefore a dramatic interest. But the chief point about Nietzsche, to whom the same characterization will apply, is—his career being, romantically, negligible—his philosophy that ultimately dethroned his reason. The interest must be a deliberately intellectual one. You can account for his singular influence. on others (Persis Fennamy, the young heroine, of "The Encounter" included) only by realizing the potency of his thought—and in a novel you cannot take a knowledge of this thought for granted on the part of the general reader. To understand even Persis, you must know more about Nietzschism than Mrs. de Selincourt is willing, fearing dulness, to expound; and if you do yourself know the requisite amount, the texture of the author's exposition seems disappointingly slight. As for style, Mrs. de Selincourt's chief gift is an almost miraculous clearness. I think she could rewrite the most subtle, concentrically parenthesized thought of Mr. Henry James in a way that would be intelligible to a child. If there is a distinct gain in clarity there is also a slight loss of flavor. On the whole, the book will be caviar to the general, and to the knowing ones, simply light comedy. But as Vanity Fair rather specializes in both—why, "there you are!"

MR. J. D. BERESFORD, whose novel, "The House in Demetrius Road," is the first of his I have read, impresses me at once as a writer of exceptional talent. The "House" shelters ,a brilliant Scottish publicist, Robin Greg; his secretary, a very young, singleminded Cantabrigian, Martin Bond; and Greg's deceased wife's sister, Margaret Hamilton, in charge of his little daughter. Greg is a dipsomaniac, and the plot hinges on the conspiracy between the secretary and the sister-in-law, to effect a cure, together with most of the possible emotional complications that can arise between two men and one woman when each party is in a strikingly distinct way an unusual and attractive personality. His publishers speak of Mr. Beresford as a realist. He certainly is that in method, but in method only: in temper he is fundamentally a romanticist—so far as these blurred tags nowadays mean anything. His method is in interesting contrast with, say, Mr. Bennett's. To me the high defect of the latter is that his picture, brilliant, detailed, sharply clear, is, to use a painter's term, all in one plane; background, middle-distance, foreground, however justly proportioned the objects, are all painted with the same "intensity" of color,—and the whole thing begins pretty soon to shriek at you. Or to vary the figure with Mr. Wells, whose method (and I am speaking of only that) is as if he were playing the piano with one foot always on the loud pedal and the tempo always presto. Mr. Beresford, in short, has a very sensitive appreciation of values, and he uses his material with the tact of a conscientious artist rather than the bravura of a brilliant journalist. The book, dealing almost exclusively with mental states, and in the case of Greg with one of an extreme morbidity, is a model of clear psychology, with an unexpectedly dramatic interest. And with the writer's precision, soundness, and artistic self-restraint, there is a quality of sweetness in the book (I wish we had some other English word for that) which one hopes Mr. Beresford will not lose with his youth.

"THE CLEAN HEART," by Mr. A. S. M. Hutchinson, has in it more "adventure" than the last two novels, but it none the less centres on an exceptional mental state. Mrs. de Selincourt's protagonist, Wehlitz, is gradually growing insane with philosophical megalomania (Uebermensch-ism), Mr. Beresford's fluctuates in his sanity through delirium tremens. Mr. Hutchinson's problem is to bring his hero, Wriford, a young novelist and editor, back to a sanity which he has temporarily lost through overstrain. The study is an exceptionally interesting and close one, and in its course involves a series of adventures of the most picaresque type. Wriford after failing to drown himself in the Thames takes flight from London and on the open road meets a lyrical old tramp called Puddlebox (a very Locke-ish name); together they foot it through a number of Fieldingesque brawls until, through a catastrophic selfsacrifice on the tramp's part, Wriford is left alone. Eventually he turns schoolmaster and reforms a sort of Dotheboy's Hall, and eventually the "love-interest" enters and things finally straighten out, but not before another catastrophic, and unfortunately parallel, selfsacrifice is involved on the part of the odd little heroine. It is all told in a vivid, highspirited, but nervous way that is perhaps necessary to echo the mental processes of the hero; but once or twice at least Mr. Hutchinson's style gets the bit in its teeth and runs away like Dickens on one of his prose-poetry rampages. It's an interesting book, a bit in the vein of Mr. Bennett's "Buried Alive" and a bit in the vein of Mr. Canaan's "Old Mole," and yet very much itself.

THE Duke Litta portrays in "Monsignor Villarosa" a very troubled spirit indeed, an Italian bishop who, with the noblest intentions, finds himself to be a "Modernist" and at odds with the Holy See on many points, one of which, affecting his beloved nephew and his nephew's betrothed, is the Catholic law against divorce. The Bishop in his attempts at agrarian reform is bitterly opposed by the landed proprietors about him, and after publishing a work of supreme theological scholarship is finally crushed by Rome. Monsignor Villarosa, very much the aristocratic, silverhaired saint, is meant to be an appealing figure, and he is so, but it is in an oddly feminine way that mitigates one's surprise at the failure of his administration. The book will undoubtedly pain many English-speaking Catholics, but if they will simply compare the Duke's little clerical group at Treviso with Trollope's corresponding group at B archester, they may come to realize (and it will be a useful, if not very novel thought) that the fundamental difference between them is far more a racial one than a religious. Furthermore, while the Duke undoubtedly understands his Italians, his knowledge of the details of the Catholic Church is singularly shaky (e.g. Monsignor Villarosa, paying his visit ad limina, and wearing what the author calls a mozetta, meaning a zuchetto, is said not to have been in Rome before in thirty years!). He should be taken not as a specialist but simply as a novelist, even if one with an anticlerical axe to grind, and his novel, though thin, like a somewhat dilute mixture of Togazzaro and Mr. Richard Bagot, is both interesting and dramatic.

THE plot of Miss Jennette Lee's novelette, "The Woman in the Alcove," is one of exceptional subtlety and ingeniousness, and it is handled with a delicacy and sureness of touch that beautifully guards its simplicity of effect.

Books Reviewed

THE ENCOUNTER By Anne Douglas Sedgwick

The Century Co., New York $i .30

THE HOUSE IN DEMETRIUS ROAD By J. D. Beresford

George H. Doran Co., New York $1.30

THE CLEAN HEART By A. S. M. Hutchinson

Little, Brown & Co., Boston St .35

MONSIGNOR VILLAROSA By Pompeo, Duke Lilta

G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York $1.35

THE WOMAN IN THE ALCOVE By Jennette Lee

Charles Scribner's Sons, New York $1.00