Legend

A Novel for CriticsTHERE are, in the harsh phrase, poets' poets and novelists' novelists. Here is a story not only for the novelist but for the critic. It is a very short book, but one of very extraordinary richness and intricacy. Roads lead from it into all the regions of literature and life. One might follow any one of them and reach the uplands of high speculation. It has scarcely any predecessors except a few stories of the literary life that belong to Henry James's middle period: "The Lesson of the Master," "The Death of the Lion." Though far closer in texture and unwavering in vision, it also, at moments, recalls Gissing's "New Grub Street." Technically it stands alone in English fiction. In other literatures its structural method is not unknown. The single scene is the drawing-room of the critic, Anita Serle. It is the occasion of her monthly "at home," and the small group present consists wholly of writers. Anita's mother and her young cousin, Jenny Summer, who, years later, records the memories of that evening, are the only naive minds there. About the scene there is something very hot and bright, and its shadows have a ghostly definiteness of outline. Now and then the mellow London fog swirls in and the sense of the isolation of these people grows acuter. The talk lacks inner impulse at first because the very soul and centre of these evenings, the novelist Madala Grey, is absent. Of late her absences have been frequent; she is almost a deserter, having gone off into the country and married a simple doctor. Now she is ill. Yet Anita cannot, even at this moment, forgive her that defection from the service of art. There is an inner hush in spite of the chatter until the painter, Kent Rehan, comes in with the crushing announcement of Madala's death. In the tragic excitement of the hour Anita lets herself go. She confesses having played Boswell to the genius and the life of Madala. She is the literary executor and will write the dead woman's biography. And in the course of the evening she builds up her "legend" of that life, a legend which is corrected for us by the very memories and documents she displays and misinterprets, by the choric comments of her aged mother's wandering mind, by the clean, human perceptions of little Jenny Summer, and by the few gestures and infinitely expressive silences of Kent Rehan. The projected "life" will be false to the core. For Madala Grey was not the problematic soul of Anita's critical rationalization. She wrote "Eden Walls" and "Ploughed Fields" by the free effort of an inborn story-teller's gift. She was a being all simple goodness and spontaneous charm - a creature of the clearest human sunlight to whom her country doctor was not (as Anita supposes) a refuge from some passionate experience, but in truth the fulfillment of life. "Can literature fill my emptiness?" Madala had written in a letter which, according to Anita, could never have been addressed to the homespun Dr. Carey. "Are the books I write children to love me with your eyes?" The condemnation of the critical intelligence here given us is complete.But was Anita's cold intellect really quite so warped and barren? The author, of course, carries out her intention and by her exquisite and vivid indirection makes every reality of Madala Grey's true being a rebuke to Anita. But she has placed in our hands two documents that make poor Anita's position defensible, to say the least. Unlike other novelists and playwrights who deal with the life of art Clemence Dane has given us two specimens of her protagonist's work. She has quoted for us seven pages of "Eden Walls." And those seven pages- - letters and glimpses and arguments aside - were written by Anita Serle's Madala Grey and not by Jenny Summer's or Kent Rehan's or the eerie old mother's. - "The Nation," Vol. 110 [1920]


Genre: Literary Fiction