The Foolish Lovers
by , New York: The Macmillan Co. 1920. 12mo, vi+403 pp. $2.00.
Mr. ST. JOHN ERVINE’S great talent is in portraying character and idiosyncrasy, especially, we believe, masculine character, and the struggle — intimate, often unspoken, always subtle — that grows out of the interaction of very diverse human beings. Who that saw them on the stage will forget Jimmy Cæsar, the tragi-comic weakling in John Ferguson, or Jane Clegg’s incorrigible husband ? It is the people, not the plot, that we remember both in Ervine’s plays and in his novels: the crises that unite or separate them are the inevitable consequence of their own poignant psychology. The Foolish Lovers is less ambitious in scope than the last novel. Changing Winds: the canvas is smaller, the characters fewer, and the whole seems firmer, tenser, swifter, more carefully designed. The hero is again a young Irishman who is by way of becoming a writer. John MacDermott has, however, grown up in a much simpler cultural environment than Henry Quinn— in a small (but ‘proud’) Irish town called Ballyards near Belfast, where the MacDermotts have an old house, a family grocery business, and an esteemed situation. The human influences about him are a widowed mother, who loves her son and her traditions with a ‘long clutching love’; Uncle Alac, whose earthly career has not been successful but who has had ‘a queer good time reading books’ and dreaming of romantic adventure; and Uncle William, who has tended the business and borne the whole weight of the family with cheerful efficiency.
When called on to choose a profession, John, grandly sure of himself, decides to go to London and write books. His capacity for falling in love at first sight quickly interferes with his literary career. He sees Eleanor Moore at a shop where she is taking her secretarial tea, pursues her to her doorstep, batters her into marrying him by sheer egotistic determination, and tries to support her by journalism while his books and plays are coming into their own. The second crisis of the novel is the struggle between Eleanor’s love of safety-reinforced by a child, and by a silent alliance with John’s mother — and John’s proud unwillingness to own himself beaten. The outcome may not satisfy those who think a second-class writer better than a first-class shopkeeper. And how do we know John will succeed with the shop ?
The young hero is by far the more interesting of the ‘foolish’ pair — maddening and charming, rightand wrong-headed, generous and selfish, symbolizing Ireland in a way of his own. If Ervine barely touches the edge of the Irish ‘problem ’ as such, he states it — with rare detachment — through the suggestions and evocations of art. He has the native touch of irresistible humor, and that, other tender Irish gift of drawing tears out of a stone — creating from unpromising realistic elements an atmosphere of beauty and poetry. E. S. S.