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Novels and Novelists

The Old and the New Hand

page 221

The Old and the New Hand

The Foolish Lovers — By St. John Ervine
The Great Leviathan — By D. A. Barker

‘You can't expect a man to produce a masterpiece every time. He may not think much of this new book, himself. It's possible that he was bound to turn one out this season….’ But this gentle rain from Heaven upon our indignation in no wise cools it. We do expect each novel that a man writes to be better than the last, to be in fact that novel that we had imagined from the promise of his first books he was capable of writing. A ‘masterpiece’ is, of course, exaggeration. It has come to mean (see any young author's press notices) a novel which is not as other novels are. But, failing a sign, failing a few explanatory words, or a reproduction of the agreement, say, between publisher and author, which demonstrates how, willy-nilly, the thing had to be finished at a certain date, we shall go on treating each new book as the one that the author considers—or how could he honestly publish it?—an advance upon his last. That being so, the question arises how on earth Mr. St. John Ervine could have imagined ‘The Foolish Lovers’ to be a patch upon ‘Mrs. Martin's Man.’ Not that the latter was a great book, but it had qualities which made it possible for one to understand the admiration it aroused. It had vitality, a spareness, a sharpness of outline, and, more important than any of these, the emotional atmosphere was sustained from cover to cover. But ‘The Foolish Lovers’ has nothing to commend it but a good beginning.

While John Macdermott is a boy, living in the shop at Ballyards (which everybody knows is a town in Ulster) with his uncle William, a quiet, understanding man, a lovable ancient whose life is book-reading, and his passionate, hot-headed ‘Ma’—while he and they talk in the queer, nice, Irish way, and there is a smell of wet page 222 earth and of turf fires and the cold smell of brackish water —we are not without hope. But John grows up and goes to London and becomes not a writer, not a young man, but a creature of pen and paper. Enter lodgings at Brixton, the cockney maid, the usual theatricals on the ground floor, the melancholy landlady and the old, old London herring across the trail for comic relief. Enter also, for love interest, a pair of blue eyes. Well, there is this to be said. The author appears to be as bored by this hired furniture as we are, and when at the end John and Blue Eyes are led by baby fingers back to the old home in Ireland he does not scruple to use all the old tags that go to make short work of a story. But why did he write it? Or rather, why did he give up writing it? Perhaps he would reply that what is not worth doing is not worth doing well. It is a possible explanation.

We have no other novel of Mr. Barker's to measure ‘The Great Leviathan’ by. For a first attempt it is a commendable piece of work, but it does not—if one may be permitted the expression—cut any ice. It is pleasantly written, and there are many happy touches, but we are never certain as to what it is that the author is after. If he was after nothing, but merely engaged in showing us these various sketches of Tom, we should understand him better. But there is the title, and scattered here and there are vague intimations that his chief concern is to show us how Tom escaped, or was injured by the monster, Society. We are led to suppose that the early knowledge gained of his mother's unhappy marriage haunted him through his boyhood, and when he came to fall in love it was because of this that he refrained from making Mary his wife. But it is very unconvincing. Neither does the case of Mary, who was brave enough to live with him ‘in sin’ as she presumably considered it, ring true. The Mary he describes would not have cared a button for the opinions of the cabbies on the rank at the end of their road. And why in Heaven's name, Mr. Barker, should those cabbies have known? Shall we be detestable page 223 enough to say to the new author: ‘And now, having got so far, why not try your hand at something a great deal better?’

(July 16, 1920.)