Two English Novels

"Ursula Trent" and "The China Shop" Have the Usual Virtues of Their Kind

JOHN PEALE BISHOP

MR. W. L. GEORGE was, I am told, brought up in France, and there he acquired a skeptic habit of mind. Returning to England at his maturity, he was able to find amusement and surprise in what was henceforth to be his country; his early detachment has remained; he is an inquisitive satirist, not yet grown complacent to English ways. "So many of us are foreigners among mankind", he says, "and hold on with weak hands to the habits of a people we never know, to traditions long dead." He has a surprising way of showing up the Englishman,; he is not so successful in revealing the man. A feminist, he is rather too glib in his conclusions on women.

But let us consider Ursula, -Trent (Harper's), his latest novel. Ursula Trent, in the course of the narrative, acquires two other surnames: Quin when she moves into the apartment of Julian Quin; Brough when she marries Alex Brough. Yet she remains throughout the daughter of Sir William Trent of Ciber Court, an advanced woman unable to discard her ladyhood. She wears her ladyhood as a tortoise wears its brown lozenged shell; occasionally she shrinks under its protection: more often she trails it with her, an incommodious ornament.

The Lordliness of Oswald

URSULA—the story is told in the first person—begins her history with her engagement to Lord Oswald—a radical Tory "whose every feature was fine, burnt goldy-brown by open air and exercise." She is still complacently at home in an English country house, among her own kind. (Sea anemones she afterwards learns to call them, brown semi-opaque animals which "hold up in placid pools ineffectual and lovely hands for nutriment which they need not seek.") Then Oswald, who becomes, in his lordly English way, even more handsome under the hands of his military tailor, passes—is killed, in short, before the end of 1914. Ursula is already at work in a hospital, learning, among other things, that men are creatures with veins that lust and bleed.

Henceforth, unable to endure her parents, she goes to London with fortytwo pounds, to search the advertisement columns in the Times and to find employment as a secretary to Mrs. Vernham, a lady novelist, with a suecession of pink chins over a black silk bodice. The girl who lodges next to Ursula stabs herself for her cockney Casanova: Ursula, brought to a pitch of excitement, allows the novelist's nephew to take her to dinner.

"His blue eyes looked sorrowful and he leaned toward me. I thought he was going to touch me, and shrank half away, half toward him. But he did not. Still he considered me with those sad blue eyes; his melancholy grew, as, over coffee, we smoked in silence. I looked at him furtively, Yes, he was very good-looking. Oh,

I know that women pretend that they don't care what a man looks like if he's got strength, as we call it, or character, but I know better. Who shall resist lips carved in marble? Soft eyes with level brows? I was sorry for him. As I got up, rather carefully, to take off the hat that worried me, I was sorry for myself. I flung my hat down on the occasional table, and there stood for a moment, saddened by the temporary quality of life. I felt so warm and light now, but in a few hours, as he said, or was it minutes, we'd part. I couldn't bear it. Tears formed in my eyes. Almost at once he was by my side and I was in his arms. 'Darling,' he whispered, 'what is it? What makes you unhappy?' " 'I don't know.'

" 'Oh, I do.and there's only one cure for that.' I was too tired to ask what was the cure for the pain of the world. I was content to stand there for a moment in his embrace, and to give my lips to his consoling kisses. I was comfortable and safe. I liked to feel about me this male grasp. What could harm me within such a ring? " 'I love you,' he whispered.

"I did not reply. I don't think I quite believed him, but I liked to think I did.

" 'Since the first moment I saw you,' he muttered, 'I've loved you.'

"Still I was passive in his arms, and he construed rightly this passivity. I didn't care what happened. His voice still rang in my ears,

" 'You too ... . you cared?' Again he kissed me. I was unendurably weary, careless. I just didn't mind, Then I found myself weeping, softly, and he didn't seem to care."

Thus the plucking of the first primrose. Philip, before Ursula is quite accustomed to his touch, before the "first hatred that men call passion had passed away," departs. With Philip gone, Ursula finds Mrs. Vemham's house intolerable. She decided upon manicuring as an ocupation. To her shop, to her curtained booth, comes Julian Quin,

Love Among Orange Sticks

"TOWARD the end of July, while I was working on the hands of a new customer, I was overwhelmed by his beauty. He lay, negligent, talking very little, but from time to time I threw him a furtive glance which he met without excitement. He looked about thirty, was rosy-faced, with a rather tip-tilted nose. Bright blue eyes gleamed under arched brows that shone like bright gold, and a high forehead led up to a mass of wavy golden hair.

To me he was terribly beautiful, like one of those insolent little plaster Apollos. He had no defect at all, for the chin was small but strong; the lips, red and curling, were cruel and exquisite. The hands were thin, but not weak. As I manicured him I thought that he was together effeminate and a savage, the brooding outcast of an imperial race, some rotten but delicious Hapsburg."

Julian, the plaster Apollo, turns out to be a couturier, who dreams languorously of brocades, paduasoy and bombazine: who attaches amorous ladies to his person, as idly as he fastens rosebuds of tulle to gown; who destroys his male friends financially with the same ease with which he tears up an unsatisfactory fashion drawing.

Slowly and with infinite indolence Julian draws Ursula to him. She takes his name, for convenience, and begins to move by his side through an amazing set: Bill Gordon, the Durham middle weight, a boxer with social ambitions; Christine Waldron, a faded imitation of Mary Pickford; Mr. Montmorency Satterthwaite, lately Mr. Moses Samuel, proprietor of innumerous cinemas; Lord Alfred Lydbrook, a St. Martin of the Clubs, gracefully dividing his cloak with any attractive female beggar; and other such. There is a season of intrigue and counter intrigue, amorous and financial. Ursula is driven forth by Julian's infidelities, drawn back by his baroque beauty. When, finally, the situation becomes intolerable, Mr. Alex Brough, substantial and forgiving, an architect and a gentleman, stands waiting to bring an end to sensual romanticism and to propose marriage.

Ursula Trent is a diverting tour de force—that Mr. George should allow his heroine to tell her own story, must, I think, be considered a tour de force. The various episodes are presented adroitly, with an abundance of intimate, sly detail; there is satire, facile and clever to a degree; there is some admirable cutting of intricate figures on thin ice. But of the qualities which make literature, I perceive scarcely a trace. Ursula Trent is to Le Lis Rouge what Main Street is to Madame Bovary. It is only fair to say that it is not the best of W. L. George.

The Wisdom of Mr. George

I APPEND a few sententious bits culled from the conversation of the characters.

Love brings lots of business to lawyers, but apart from that it's a damned nuisance.

Language means something, and now Greek literature has ceased to mean anything to us who don't believe in the gods.

We (women) always invest all our money at the bank of Eros, and we are amazed when it suspends payment.

Men who don't love you always write beautiful letters.

Virtues are the greatest luxuries, but so far as I can see a man has to get jolly rich before he thinks of acquiring them.

Lots of women go to their graves without loving, but I know what it's like. It's like having a fish hook in one. It hurts, but you can't get it out.

Weakness, not strength, can have power over women. The weakness of men calls to us.

I'm a futurist—a futurist without a future.

Men are so religious about wine. They're religious about all their pleasures.

Mr. George performs his trick with an air of triumph: Ursula Trent does seem to speak in feminine accents. Mrs. G. B. Stern is not so successful with Kevin Somers to whom she intrusts the narrative of The China Shop; his masculine voice is drowned out by too frequent swishings of the novelist's skirt. The relationship between Kevin Somers and Larry Munro, subdued hatred and active love, may be necessary to the conduct of the story; psychological it not infrequently passes credulity.

The first Larry Munro had been a romantic actor, to whom Somers' mother Felicity was to have been married, had he but lived three days longer. The second Larry, whom Somers begins to hate—con amore—as a boy, becomes at eighteen the father of a third Larry and his twin Yolande: Felicity is the mother. Larry has at this time "lit up to amazing beauty— that elusive tiptoe gift which among maidens is known as beauti du diable, precious because indefinable, because at any moment it may wing away: because it tugs the tears to the eyes, and rouses an unquiet desperate wish to clutch at it and do something with it, quickly-"

Discovering the existence of Larry's children—his own half brother and sister—Somers flies to Cornwall, there to renew the struggle with Larry for the seventeen-year old Barbara Seton, a goose-girl out of a fairy tale by some English Andersen. Youth to youth— Felicity, now forty-two, has fallen into ill-favour with her all too youthful lover; Mrs. Stern having arrived in Cornwall produces Larry from, her sleeve by an expedient trick.

Now here is obviously a situation with tragic possibilities—the protagonist in conflict with a dynasty of Larrys; a relation intricate and incestuous. But let no one be alarmed. The treatment is skillful, clever: there is an elaborate interplay of well-bred characters, interludes of glamourous nonsense. But there is no tragedy, not even where Larry Munro is killed in the long war, not even when a possible infanticide is hinted at in the closing scenes. The China Shop remains an excellent story, told with a brilliantly laboured art. It, too, fails of any contact with greatness.

I have selected, more or less at random, these two novels of the younger English novelists, the post-Wellsian school. Almost any others would have shown the same qualities; an admirable skill, sharp-eyed observations and sharp-tongued epigrams, a smart facility with surfaces, an unabashed disregard of anything below the surface. Except for Lawrence, who is an outcast, and Joyce who is Irish, I can perceive nowhere a hint of great creative vigor, nothing of the material out of which masterpieces are made. After the giants had piled Ossa upon Pelion, no dohbt the work of men seemed small.