Looking on

One after Another — By Stacy Aumonier

It would seem nowadays that there is some readjustment going on in the general mind between the importance of feeling and the importance of thought. Was feeling ever simple? We doubt it, and yet we find some of our younger writers looking back upon it as something which it was not impossible to live by in other times, but which, owing to the immense complication of modern existence, has been proved inadequate. They remind us, in fact, dismally enough, of a party of men who realize that unless something is done, and done pretty quickly, they will find themselves winter-bound, ice-bound. So this is no time for feeling; they must think a way out. But what is the use, to your artist at any rate, of thought that is not the outcome of feeling? You must feel before you can think; you must think before you can express your- page 197 self. It is not enough to feel and write; or to think and write. True expression is the outcome of them both, yet a third thing, and separate.

‘One after Another’ is a novel which lies as it were half way between the two. Now it inclines towards feeling, and now towards thought. And so it divides and subdivides. It is rich and poor, cold and hot, dull and deeply interesting. There are moments of fusion, as, for example, the death of Laura, which give us a glimpse of this book as it might have been, and set us wondering what other author to-day is capable of such sincere and powerful work. But the impression of the whole is of something which has just not succeeded.

There are times when Mr. Aumonier's hero reminds us of that strange character in Tchehov's story ‘My Life.’ He is, in the same way, obedient to Life, and content to be used. Some things move him, and move him profoundly at the time, but the feeling that everything passes is his strongest feeling of all. He begins life as the son of a publican in Camden Town and brother to the famous Laura, a dark, passionate girl who is determined to live, to have a career, to escape from all that she dislikes through music. At the end of his life-story we feel that he is still the son of that simple, living father, that all that has happened to him has been a kind of prolonged looking-on at the queer people who came and went. But Laura has, in some strange way, become the dark, passionate music in which she desired to lose herself.