Love Is Enough
by . New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1927. l2mo. x+419 +475 pp. 2 vols. $5.00.
THIS is a beautifully written novel, in which the life of a ‘nice’ young woman, attractive and moderately intelligent, is traced from the close of her boarding-school days to the eve of her third marriage. In its leisurely progress and richness of detail as well as in its illustration of all the phases of erotic and maternal love, it will appeal to readers who still cherish affection for the Victorians. There is nothing in it to disturb the lover of George Eliot and Trollope. And yet. it is by no means merely conventional. In method it is distinctly modern, for the author has eschewed the ’omniscient’ attitude and has told his story without deviation from the point of view of the heroine; and in its psychology it is of the present century. Perhaps it has been only our sentimentality that has made us think in the past that, in novels, one love is enough. Here we have three, described at length, with two marriages made and one in prospect, and with passing fancies for at least two other men.
The author might have entitled his novel The Portrait of a Lady, if that title had not been anticipated, for Love Is Enough is the portrait of Clare. And Clare’s portrait is that of a woman in love. Occasionally her emotions are caught up (‘sublimated’ is the current term, I believe) and centred for a time by music or religion, and, almost throughput, her love for Steven, the child of her first marriage, competes successfully for her love of her first and second husbands; but these disturbing or contributory experiences only serve to point the truth that hers is a life of emotion, outwardly controlled by convention and morality, but, because of its singleness of purpose and instinctive power, always gaining its ends. If the author is not an ironist, —and, because of the absence of any comment, one cannot be sure,—he wishes us to believe that passion and instinct, or nature, are the best guides of all. Certainly he ends on this note, for almost on the last page Dudley, Clare’s second husband, whom she left ostensibly because he and Steven could not agree, declares that ‘love is the only thing that matters in life. . . . Love is the only reality in this fantastic, ironical life.
. . . It is a crime against life and against love, which is the best of life, to sacrifice either. . . . The crime against life! That’s what I call the crime against the Holy Ghost: the unforgivable sin.’
The only reason why one suspects irony at all is that the men are unable to achieve Clare’s living by instinct, and there seems to be no reason why the novel might not go on for several volumes. If Clare and Robert, her prospective third husband, should have a child, the story might begin all over again and, except for differences of detail, reproduce the cycle of the present one. For, though Clare at the end is a ‘small, neat, gray-haired woman, with a gentle mouth, that had known sorrow, and happy eyes, which were still full of tears,’one may believe that she is not essentially different from the charming girl who, nine, hundred pages earlier, was reading The More Excellent Way. But if there is any irony here it is at the expense of the men, and it is the irony of life. How true Clare is to life perhaps only a woman can tell. To a reviewer congenitally limited she is convincing throughout volume one and becomes something of a bore about the middle of volume two.
Lovers of Worcestershire, Shropshire, and the Welsh Border will be delighted with English scenes that could have been written only by a poet. And many minor characters. Aunt Cathie. Lady and Sir Joseph Hingston, Steven as a little boy, are excellently portrayed. The style is a constant pleasure, because it is scholarly, firm, colored, and warm, at times rising to lyrical beauty.
R. M. GAY