A Group of Recent Novels

AMONG the gayest of new novels is Arnold Bennett’sAccident—not an extravaganza like The Vanguard, but an immensely amusing and an absorbing comedy. It tells how a railway mishap affected a perilous crisis in the relations of a newly married pair, and it searches with penetration nine-tenths wicked and one-tenth sympathetic the introspective and rather self-approving soul of Mr. Alan Frith-Walter, father of the bridegroom. Whether or not young John Frith-Walter’s spirited bride will forgive him for turning Kaborite is a question of great interest; of greater interest is the brilliantly narrated accident; but most interesting of all are the rapid fire of absurdities and the touches of nature, such as Mr. Alan Frith-Walter’s sense of enhanced importance after having been through the train wreck. ’Often he would be asked about it, and often he would refer to it without being asked.’

Fragments from The Prelude, which Mr. Frith-Walter had highly resolved to read upon his journey, are woven into the story with sardonic effect.

Two sharply contrasting first novels, one English and one American, are H. W. Freeman’sJoseph and His Brethren and Walter D. Edmonds’sRome Haul. The former, a quiet pastoral, is a study of

such dumb loving of the . . . loam As breaks the dumb hearts of the English kind.

Crakenhill Karin sways the lives of the Geaitters. Love for the place is the one softness of the somewhat monstrously hard old man, Benjamin Geaitter: and in his sons youthful rebellion at the exactions of the farm is transformed slowly into a deep passion for it. Those of the brothers who try to escape try in vain. ’Poor little owd’ lambs seen from a train window, lambs far inferior to those of Crakenhill, turn Bob and Hiram back; a big black sow strongly resembling one of his own has the same power upon Ern; and even young Joey, beglamoured by the notion of joining the circus, is swept home on a tide of nostalgia at the sight of a mower swinging his scythe with beautiful skill. One does not, however, suspect the author of weakness in the invention of incident. Obviously, this almost choric uniformity is studied, and it has its effect.

Mr. Freeman’s skill shows at its best not in the lighter passages, but in the depicting of deep, inarticulate loves and loyalties, and the passive tyranny of the beautiful and inexorable earth.

Rome Haul, a more objective novel, paints a picture, real as memory, of traffic on the Erie Canal in its early days. ' Boats coming and going,’says the peddler, ’passing you all the while. You can hear their horns blowing all day long. As like as not there’s a fight at every lock. There’s all kinds of people there, and they re going all the while.’

There is good drawing of character in the portraits of Dan Harrow, laconic, simple, and very much a man, and of Molly, with her easy moral code, her courage, and her honesty. The narrative, with its largely monosyllabic dialogue, is crisp and energetic. The dramatic climax, however, the fight between Dan and Klore, the bad man of the canal, misses something of its effect through being led up to a little too persistently and obviously. More effective are the death of Samson Weaver, the bringing down of the injured lumberjack through the fierce snowstorm, and old John Durble’s story of the opening of the canal — a beautiful and moving bit of narrative. Like Mr. Freeman, Mr. Edmonds writes of the earth as one who loves it. W eather and season are a living part of his novel. His description of the night in late winter when the ice cracks in the canal, and Dan and Molly feel a ripple washing the side of the boat, conveys with real art the sense of release and renewal. Mr. Edmonds paints landscape in a higher key than Mr. Freeman, but both achieve harmony and life.

O. E. Rölvaag’sPeder Victorious, sequel to Giants in the Earth, is pervaded somewhat less than the earlier book by a feeling of the encompassing prairie, with its beauty, its mystery, and its menace. For here the battle is not between man and earth, but between spirit and spirit—between young Peder Victorious Holm, w ho grows from a singularly impressionable and thoughtful child into a high-minded, strong-willed youth, sensitive and passionate but altogether normal, and his mother, the troubled Beret Holm, in whom maternal tenderness is almost eaten away by a fanaticism that is not far from her derangement in the first novel. Like all fanatics who are driven, not by the passion for controlling, but by anxious love, Beret is half antagonizing and half piteous. It is an admirable stroke of art that shows her restored to a saner mind by an apparition somewhere between hallucination and dream; for it is certain that she was past any human persuasion and any teaching of experience.

Something of the spaciousness given to Giants in the Earth by the hovering sense of the prairie is given to Pader Victorious by the sweeping current of human change. The conflict of mother and son is a part of the inevitable conflict of immigrant parents and American-born children, intensified by the strength of the two personalities: Beret, with her distorted heroism, and young Peder, with his fiery eagerness and aspiration.

With rather less pictorial beauty than the earlier novel, this story of the second generation is filled with the vitality and the wonder of adolescence; and the largeness of the theme is again matched by the simple power of the narrative.

Alain-Fournier’s novel of fifteen years ago. Le Grand Meaulness, now translated into English under the title of The Wanderer, is an original, strange, and beautiful book. It has a dreamlike quality, at once sharply clear and far away. The style holds in translation its limpidity and its curious magic.

To M. Seurel’s village school for boys comes Augustin Meaulnes, a seventeen-year-old youth of stormy temperament and of extraordinary self-reliance and sang-froid. Against the rather bleak background of life at M. Seurel’s school, and a larger background of idyllic French landscape, is enacted that ethereal yet impassioned fantasy, the romance of ’the great’ Meaulnes and the lovely Yvonne de Galais.

The tale is told by M. Seurel’s young son, who is dominated instantly by the older boy, and attaches himself to him with a schoolboy ardor that survives beyond their student days as a self-forgetful and chivalrous devotion. To François Seurel’s adolescent eyes, the great Meaulnes comes flashing into the repetitious round of school life like some wild, strong spirit from another sphere, and, by his strange adventure into the ‘Lost Land,’flings back the portals of an unknown world of romance.

The half-mad brother of Yvonne dominates much of the story, whether as vehement actor or as invisible but potent presence. His portrait, so fantastic and at the same time so vividly alive, reflects the dual character of the novel. For, as only invention and memory hand in hand can do it, The Wanderer beautifully harmonizes the everyday with the marvelous, the simple routine and incident of classroom and playground, mechanical, comic, or violent, with a strange tale of love and woe. Tbe reader emerges from this novel with the sense of having been in a far country to which he will hardly find the way again.

To turn from The Wanderer to The Case ofSergeant Grischa, by Arnold Zweig, is to pass into it world of terrible realism. This novel is a magnificent piece of work, finely translated.

‘What was it all about?'

‘Oh, nothing much really. . . . Nothing of any importance. . . . The real trouble was the question of jurisdiction.’

Nothing much really. Among German military problems of 1917, the case of that simple creature the Russian sergeant Grischa is an atom of measureless insignificance. Grischa is condemned to death for an offense of which he is presently proved innocent. W ill his sentence be rescinded, or will his unimportant life be sacrificed to the wrangle over jurisdiction, to that jealous and arrogant insistence upon precedence that masks itself as zeal for ’the interests of discipline’?

With this theme, out of a mass of detail and a great number of characters the author builds up a narrative of extraordinary unity and stern power. His vigorous and lucid style visualizes scenes with the utmost clarity, drives in his point of irony, or wrings the reader with intolerable pity. In the beginning, Grischa is rather like a great child, kind, and full of honest intentions and simple wonderments. During his protracted torment of suspense, he grows into a man who ponders life and death, who can accept grim conclusions without losing any of his sweetness of spirit or his magnanimity, Yet, for all Grischa’s philosophy and resignation, the reader is aware of the truth that he himself is aide to hold off except in a sinking moment now and then: that overmastering panic still waits in ambush for him. One doubts whether there is to be found in contemporary fiction a chapter s() terrible as the one entitled ‘The black beast ; one ventures to assert, that whoever reads this chapter will carry the memory of it with him as long as he lives.

Mr. Zweig’s power to evoke living beauty with a few words is shown in the pictures of the forest into which Grischa makes his escape from the timber camp, the forest smelling of pine and snow, now lighted by the yellow gold of sunset and now dusky with evening; in the August night of starlight over Mervinsk; and most of all in that hushed interlude, executed with an art that baffles analysis: the vigil kept by the little group of officers and nurses who have befriended Grischa, and who, as they sit listening at the eleventh hour for word of his reprieve, find such assuagement for their strained souls in the solemn loveliness of the Bach aria sung by Sister Sophie.

However the long agony of the childlike and manly Grischa tears a t the heart, one never loses sight of the fact that his case is a symbol; his story an impersonal, coldly furious attack upon the military system, upon ‘that most tyrannical of all social organizations, the Army : and, more broadly, upon all domination by hardness of heart and injustice, ’God forgive them,’says Corporal Sacht, ‘who bully decent fellows into behaving like swine.’ ' It must be our next task. I think.’ says Posnanski the barrister. ’to try to make the nations feel that justice hangs over them in heaven among the stars,’ From the hatred of injustice spring all the irony and the passion of this great novel,

ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS

Accident, by Arnold Bennett. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co. $2.50.

Joseph and His Brethren, by H. W . Freeman. New York: Henry Holt & Co. $2.50.

Rome Haul, by Waller D. Edmonds. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. (An Atlantic Monthly Press Publication.) $2.50.

Peder Victorious, by O. E. Rölvaag. New York: Harper & Bros. $2.50.

The Wanderer, by Alain-Fournier. Bos ton: Houghton Mifflin Co. $2.50.

The Case of Sergeant Crischa, by Arnold Zweig. New York: The Viking Press. $2.50.