Mary Olivier: A Life
By . New York; The Macmillan Company. Company. 1919. l2mo, vi+380 pp. $2.00.
‘ “SELVES are sacred. You ought, to adore them. Anybody’s self. Catty’s. ... I used to wonder what the sin against the Holy Ghost was. They told you nobody knew what it was. I know. It’s that. Not adoring the self in people. Hating it. Trying to crush it.”
‘ “Myself . . . will get a way from all of them. It’s got bits of them sticking to it, bits of Mamma, bits of Papa, bits of Roddy, bits of Aunt Charlotte. Bits of you, Mark. I don’t want to get away from you, but I shall have to. . . . There may n’t be much left when I’m done, but at least it ’ll be me.” ’
The story of Mary Olivier, whose words these are, is the story of how one woman’s self extricated itself from the wrappings of convention and inhibition in which it was swathed from birth by the conditions of the middle-class English family into which it was born; also, of course, more broadly, by the universal conditions of human nature and of the society in which human nature expresses itself. It is a story frequently told nowadays, especially since The Way of All Flesh was published. But it is doubtful whether any writer has done so much as Miss Sinclair now does to make that story perfectly and uniquely her own. Mary Olivier is a book for criticism to touch, if at all, with delicate and sensitive hands, simply because of the amount of suffering which has been wrought into it, without which lliere could be no such Suffusion with beauty. Not that thebookis, in the common sense, autobiography. But as a whole it brings Mary Olivier home In the reader’s perceptions as, one by one. the other characters are brought home to hers. The author makes you regard Mary Olivier, as Mary’s own temperament makes her regard those others, with a kindness transcending justice, obligation, custom, temperamental likeness, the ties of blood, piety, pity, and all that, is called sympalhy; almost transcending human nature, and reaching through to a region in which you understand the real selves of others by being those selves. It is on the mystical immediacy of this understanding of one’s fellows, and on the terribly ruthless kindness thereby evoked, that the author obviously bases her doctrine of revolt. The sell-expression for which she pleads is very near to self-immolation; nearer than the self-sacrifice of most moralists is. Following Mary Olivier from infancy lo middle life, through the successive items of her revolt against a code and to the brink of her eventual discovery of what happiness means, you find her whole existence to be an expression of spirited courage without its brutality, determination without its obstinacy, imagination without its lawlessness, and, quite the most remarkable of all, sensibility without its weakness. A creative temperament rasped by inhibitions in circumstance and struggling painfully forward through them, she has, among modern protagonists, a unique spiritual and æsthetic right to her rebellion. F. W.