observation is so exact that it has the effect of imagination;
it evokes scenes, conversations, characters. His dialogue is
by turns extraordinarily natural and brilliant, and impossibly
melodramatic; when he has to describe anything he
has a sureness and economy which recall Maupassant; he
neither turns away from unpleasant details, nor does he
stress them. There is, however, a curious inequality among
his characters. Brett, the heroine, might have stepped out
of “The Green Hat”; she is the sentimentally regarded
dare-devil, and she never becomes real. But most of the
other characters, the majority of them American Bohemians
living in Paris, are graphically drawn. The original merits
of the book are striking; its fault, equally apparent after
one’s first pleasure, is a lack of artistic significance. We
see the lives of a group of people laid bare, and we feel that
it does not matter to us. Mr. Hemingway tells us a great
deal about those people, but he tells us nothing of importance
about human life. He tells us nothing, indeed, which any
of his characters might not tell us; he writes with honesty,
but as a member of the group he describes; and, accordingly,
his narrative lacks proportion, which is the same
thing as significance. But he is still a young writer; his
gifts are original; and this first novel raises hopes of
remarkable achievement. The Spanish scenes, Cohen’s fight
with the matador, the dance in the streets, the bull fight—
these bring us in contact with a strong and original visual
world.
Like almost all Mrs. Wharton’s novels, “Twilight
Sleep” is well written, well constructed, full of understanding
and good sense, and serious, but not too serious, in
spirit. She is an admirable writer; she has recognized her
limitations; she has set her standard; and in her excellence
there is inevitably a touch of monotony. The present
story will maintain her reputation.
“A Friend of Antæus” is an exasperating story. In
the heroine, Evadne, Mr. Hopkins has admirably and truthfully
drawn a difficult character, and he has written several
scenes showing a sincere imagination. But he has encrusted
his talent, which is essentially direct and dramatic,
with all the stale paraphernalia of the Jamesian novel. We
have the unreal male confidant, partly masculine duenna
to the characters, partly laborious accoucheur of the story;
we have the tediously impressionistic Jamesian style and the
blurred Jamesian psychology. Disembarrassed of all this,
the novel would be an unusually good one. Mr. Hopkins
has something to say, but for the most part he does not use
his own voice.
Miss Ferber’s short stories are written and constructed
with devastating efficiently. They rarely transcend the class
of the good magazine story, but they never fall below it.
The author has, above all, an effective style; she has also
a tireless curiosity and an unembarrassed mind. Her
observation is clear and concise. All this makes her stories
very interesting, but she transcribes too directly from life,
and only rarely attains the imaginative intensity which
sometimes makes transcription art.
“The Flaming Flower” is a romance of the age of
Queen Anne, introducing some of the literary figures of the
time, but hardly remarkable except for flamboyance of style.
It would be interesting to compare Thomas Mann’s huge
novel with the works of Proust and Mr. Joyce. Herr Mann
has many things in common with both writers. Like Proust,
he is teased by the problem of time, and says many interesting
things about it; like both Proust and Mr. Joyce, he
casts into the mould of the novel a mass of material which
for some time has been considered unsuitable for it. He is
encyclopædic, like Mr. Joyce, but his knowledge is fuller, is
used only where it is needed, and is never exhibited for
show. His view of life takes him, like Proust, into metaphysics,
and his novel is an attempt to provide a criticism
of human existence after taking into account all the revolutions
which science has made in our conception of it. The
sheer weight of the apparatus which he applies to the figures
he portrays, the immense volume of response he draws from
them, using one instrument after another, make the book
fascinating to anyone interested in the problems of the age.
The scene of the novel is laid in a sanatorium in the Alps
where consumptives of all nationalities are gathered. The
environment itself makes the issues of life more insistent.
Life and death are here on equal terms; disease becomes
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something which cannot be ignored; the isolation of the
patients from the countries down below, the timelessness and
yet swiftness of their years, set them apart and make their
response to life already a metaphysical one. On death
Herr Mann writes with a fullness which has been absent
from English literature for a long time, and his analysis
of its processes is marvellously done. He has a fascinating
chapter on physiology; his analysis of Time, showing how
it can appear fleeting and eternal in the same period, has
been mentioned already. But one can indicate only a few
of the things in this astonishing book. It is packed with
figures: patients, doctors, nurses, visitors. Mynheer
Peeperkorn in the second volume is a masterly comic character
and a heroic figure at the same time. Herr Mann’s
preoccupation with death may appear morbid to the contemporary
mind, but he conceives it throughout as one of
the processes of life, to be comprehended by the imagination
like any of the others, and this redeems him from what
might have otherwise been an obsession. There are wearisome
passages in the novel, and much of it is difficult, but
the most difficult chapters, when they are faced, turn out
to be the most fascinating. No student of modern literature
can ignore the book. The translator’s task has been infinitely
difficult. Considering this, she has done very well, but all
the same, her English is no equivalent for Herr Mann’s
exquisite and crystalline prose. The difficulty and extent of
her task, the service she has rendered in making the book
accessible to English readers, entitle her to high praise.
EDWIN MUIR.
