Rough Justice
by . New York: Doubleday, Page and Company. 1926. 12mo. viii+326 pp. $2.50.
THERE is at least a tradition that in the old established breeds of dogs one finds a stability of temper and fixity of response which in humans is likely to be called ‘character,’ or loyalty; that the new breeds, such as the fox terrier, have a quickness and adaptability which make them more ‘intelligent,’ but snappy. The Garths of Mr. Montague’s story are of a lineage as ancient as the traditional (and gentle and stolid and determined) English bulldog. They could not have lived by their wits, but they did n’t have to. Through centuries they grew rooted in their little stretch of the Thames, almost within sight of the towers of London. As a tree marks years in the rings of its trunk, they recorded in themselves the play of summer shade across the lawns of The Chantry, the eddies of the river, the slow and significant beat of time in one little strip of land and river water. At leisure from the scramble of shifting life without, under the upstart chimneys and the pall of smoke which mushroomed over the industrial towns and London itself, where men scratched for their living like hens in a barnyard, the Garths could afford the delicately sure and patterned life which is the charm of a stable society.
At its best such a pattern, like French fruit trees against a sunny garden wall, draws its vitality from without while yielding nothing to the accidental winds of opportunity. Thomas Garth had within his reach the highest offices of British political life, but from a party point of view he was not sure — he could not be deflected from his own ways by chances and changes. So when his wife, Winifred, died (died in her sleep, one is led to believe, because she could not hear to see her little son, Auberon, grow beyond her protection) he went back to the dull cycle of county committee work, to bring up Auberon and Molly, the orphaned child of distant cousins.
Auberon lived naturally in joyous perceptions. He might have been a poet had he not been so perfectly tuned to the life of The Chantry that every rising impulse found its outlet in living, or had the force of his own self-assurance been conscious enough to carry him past the mould of public school and university life. His motif is loyalty — loyalty to people rather than to ideas. He grows gradually into the knowledge that he wants Molly, not as the elder sister which she always has been to him, but, as his wife. Molly is thrown out of her own orbit by the drunken obscenities of a malicious old neighbor. Dazzled for the time being, she thinks herself in love with the brilliant verbalist, Victor, whom both children adored from childhood. Then comes the war, testing the integrity of all three young people. Victor breaks under it and is shot as a deserter. Auberon, who feels his way into living through action, not words, is of solid staying stuff, like Molly herself, and in the end they turn inevitably to each other.
This story is the confession of a philosophy and a social faith, written in high seriousness. Its people are not individuals, but the embodiments of ideals. Are human beings ever as whole and good, even according to their own lights, as Thomas and Auberon and Molly? I must doubt it. In the telling there is little of the flash of wit and sophistication which marked the earlier, especially the critical, writings of Mr. Montague, but the prose flows with his characteristic rich smoothness. Something of such an English life must exist — it is one of the grand traditions of English story-tellers, and apparently it is an ideal to which Mr. Montague subscribes with his whole heart. But with his whole mind? To this outlander its perfection, though beautiful as an English park, is too smooth and finished to hold the thrilling current of onrushing life.
MARY ROSS