Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Novels and Novelists

Simplicity

Simplicity

Shepherd's Warning — By Eric Leadbitter
Eli of the Downs — By C. M. A. Peake

The author of to-day who chooses to write a peasant novel sets himself a by no means easy task. We have grown very suspicious of the peasant ‘as he is seen,’ very shy of dialect which is half prophecy, half potatoes, and more than a trifle impatient of over-wise old men, hot-blooded young ones, beauties in faded calico, and scenes of passion in the kitchen while the dinner is hotting up or getting cold. The psychological novel, the novel of manners and what we might call the experimental novel, inspires no such distrust; its field is wide, there would seem to be no limit to the number of its possible combinations, and we have not that strange sense that the author has committed himself to a more or less limited and determined range of experiences. There is, moreover, in the latter case, no temptation to overemphasize the relation of the peasant to the earth; to make of him a creature whose revolutions are so dependent on the seasons that it is impossible for him to fall in love out of May, or to die except at the year's end. But more difficult still to resist is the inclination to overstep the delicate boundary between true simplicity and false. True simplicity is hard, reluctant soil to cultivate, and the harvest reaped is small, but it wants but a scatter of seed flung broadcast over the false light soil to produce an appearance of richness, of growing and blowing which mocks the patient effort of the honest cultivateur.

page 153

Mr. Eric Leadbitter's latest book, ‘Shepherd's Warning,’ is, however, an example of the peasant novel wherein these several difficulties are overcome. They cease, indeed, after the first few pages, to have any reality in the reader's mind. In this extremely careful, sincere piece of work, the author makes us feel that he knows every step of the ground he treads, and that his familiarity with it prevents him from wasting time over anything that is not essential to the development of his story. There is not a moment's hesitation; Mr. Leadbitter moves within the circle of his book, easy, confident, and yet in some curious way impressing us as one who is very reticent and not given to exaggeration. He would rather let things speak for themselves, and tell their own tale. What is it all about? It is the life story of Bob Garrett, a farm labourer, from the moment he reaches the top of the hill until—down, down, slowly down—he is an old man with just strength enough to creep into the sun and call his cat. It is an account of how his three orphaned grandchildren, who live with him, grow from little children to young people in the prime of life. It tells how little Sally Dean, whose father murdered his wife because she was a bad woman with wandering blood and wild ways, grew up with the curse on her and went to the bad herself, and, fascinating Bob Garrett's two grandsons, made one marry her that her unborn child, by another man, might have a father. Sally is the wild strain in the book; the thing that can't be accounted for, that seems to be good for nothing; she is the lovely poisonous weed that Bob Garrett can't abide to see growing among his plants, and yet he cannot stamp it out. She feels herself that she ought not to be as she is; but there it is, she can't get away, she can't make herself different, she must live. And we are shown how little by little she is accepted, and with that acceptance she changes in spite of herself; she is no longer an exotic running dark and bright in the hedges for any man to gather.

As the story moves, changes, deepens, gathering new life page 154 into it, and yet keeping the old, reaching out toward new issues, and then accepting those new issues as part of it, so the village, Fidding, goes through an identical experience. When Bob Garrett is head ploughman and the finest worker on the farm, it is a self-contained, solid, old-fashioned little place and remote even from the nearest town, Pricehurst. But gradually, like Bob Garrett, it becomes inadequate to the needs of the restless rising generation. They do not sweep it away, but they ignore it until it falls into the background, a small bundle of ancient cottages with nothing but the traces of their former pride and solidity. But what is there in New Fidding to compare with Old Fidding, where every man could have told you his neighbour's garden down to a row of radishes, and where, in spite of their differences, they were held together by an implicit acceptance of life; but not of ‘the fever called living’?

‘Eli of the Downs’ is another novel that has its roots in the English country-side, but Mr. Peake is a writer who has not yet succeeded in putting a rein on his ambitions. In his eagerness to make a great figure of Eli he cannot resist picking him out, even when he is a very small one and scarce more than knee high, and overloading him with all the ornaments which are handed down as the heirlooms of childhood extraordinary. He hears tunes, sees colours, has a vision in church.

‘I did see it, grandmer,’ he ended….

‘And what then, deary?’

‘I … I don't know. I fink … I came back.’

Even though years afterwards, in a Japanese temple, his vision comes true, we highly suspect that ‘I came back.’ But this fault, which is apparent in the first pages of the book, persists throughout. The author, unlike Mr. Leadbitter, cannot leave his characters to speak their mind; he must speak it for them, and even reinforce their statements with a kind of running commentary and explanatory notes which are very tiring to keep up with. He seems, page 155 until he carries his simple shepherd overseas and sets him among highly embroidered scenes and persons, to expect our attention to flag. In that he is right, but the chief cause of our fatigue is precisely this habit of endeavouring to capture and recapture it. But the truth is that ‘Eli of the Downs’ ought to have been a short story of—certainly not more than five thousand words. We do not wish to be unkind to Mr. Peake; but we wish he would be a little less kind to himself, wish that he would slay a great many of his sheep and let us have one uninterrupted view of the shepherd.

(February 13, 1920.)