The Daughter of Kingsley.
Small, James Loub
April 21, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 659 THE DAUGHTER OF KINGSLEY By JAMES LOUIS SMALL THERE is a suggestion of irony in the fact that the daughter of Kingsley, he whose "What, then, does Dr....
...Even the time of his appearance is not without significance, for the year 1842 saw the beginning of disillusionment for the Tractarians...
...That is to say, it does not, with her, become a cause, and causes, if they imply dogmatism imply action also...
...It must be at best but accessory and as far as possible inarticulate...
...It is impossible for me to read this first in my row of three novels by Mrs...
...John, kneeling beside the little nun in the light of the tapers that shine down upon Dominic's pale face, has glimpsed the far horizon to which his tired eyes looked with longing...
...Wharton would say, "dirt for dirt's sake...
...to exchange the heavy draperies and still heavier platitudes of the Smyrthwaite menage for the salon of the gracious Gabrielle St...
...The point at issue is, whether the realism of Sir Richard Calmady is subordinated to a higher motif or is simply, as Mrs...
...But in this altogether charming novel it is neither...
...the ghastly Joanna Smyrthwaite, introspective, morose, who might have stepped out of an Ibsen horror...
...In point of fact, it, like Sir Richard Calmady, came from the presses of a general publishing house, to be later reprinted, as was its predecessor, in an edition of lower price...
...The reader is taken to England, to be sure, for brief but funereal periods, and always he is glad to return with Adrian, the gentle and optimistic, to the land of lightness and beauty...
...Leger and the bizarre eccentricities of Anastasia Beauchamp...
...Not so with Sir Richard Calmady...
...Hence it is that as the book passes in review before us, we find ourselves bending forward to catch every motion of the men and women who look down upon us from the stage: Gabrielle, who, "like all strong and self-realized natures, . . . demanded solitude at times—a place not only for rest, but for those intimate unwitnessed battles which necessarily beset the strong...
...Harrison's skilful touch has invested one with a piquancy and the other with an austere graciousness that never falters for a moment in the portrayal...
...She is not of the heady stripe who conceive an ex cathedra pronouncement to be necessary to every question that may be brought up...
...John and Dominic Iglesias and guided them to the close without the sacrifice of an iota of the reality with which they are clothed...
...And there is apologetic in The Far Horizon, of a high order, but not of a sort that is tiresomely didactic...
...Leger's femininity stops short at feminism and she is precipitated, not into its cold arms but into the ardent embrace of Adrian Savage...
...It has all been put down for us with a simple majesty that charms us by the restrained eloquence it possesses...
...A movement that is to the fore at the time of writing is always difficult of treatment, even though that treatment prefers to take the form of fiction...
...No, it is none of these by itself, nor yet all of them together, that conveys to the reader a swift and ineffaceable impression of bigness, the conviction that "the whole history is painted on a broad canvas...
...Daughter of one clergyman, Charles Kingsley, and widow of another, William Harrison, she is in a way, if anyone ever was, to reproduce for us that section of English life that depends for its meagre inner sustenance upon the parsonage...
...Thus one finds it the more difficult of discussion, as one finds it difficult to dissect before the eyes of others the virtues* and the failings of the person one loves...
...the finely polished, yet vibrant phrases that, chapter by chapter, hold our interest unabated through nearly 700 pages...
...Quentin, along with housekeeper and scullery maid and stable boy...
...Low Church people always have, I think...
...She has written of that life in a manner that is not always gentle and with an occasional flash of satire that would do credit to Trollope at his best— or worst, depending upon whether the reader does or does not possess a sympathetic attitude toward the Establishment...
...Here, again, she has made manifest the fineness of her art by eschewing the part of schoolmistress, leaving the reader to ponder and, if he will, to opine...
...But Mrs...
...If the former, we must look more closely into its raison d'etre...
...but to the Catholic, trained in the way of penance and enamored of the crown that awaits those who have voluntarily relinquished, it is divinely appropriate...
...If the latter, it has, manifestly, no legitimate excuse for the writing or reading...
...Scarcely so, for many another novel has the like, although not many writers, it must be owned, are the superiors of "Lucas Malet" in her ability to mortise description and dialogue into so perfect a pattern...
...Yet in the discussion of Adrian Savage there is none other that answers so well...
...Her knowledge of life has taught her, per contra, that one of its mercies is that we go to the grave with a considerable number of its riddles unsolved...
...To such Sir Richard Calmady will appear as a story in poise...
...Newman mean...
...It is more than possible that this is so by reason of the fact that with Madame St...
...In essaying feminism as the centre around which her story should revolve, Mrs...
...Many a convert will recognize in that inner combat a counterpart of his own, waged in the troublous days that presaged the cataclysm from which sprang faith...
...and, last of all, joy tempered with tranquil peace...
...Harrison took a bold step...
...We rejoice not so much because we have learned, as because those excellent non-Catholics in the book have learned something of the Faith in all its matchless splendor...
...In Julius March's stately and melancholy progress one senses the symbolic...
...nay more than that, a passionate yet measured epic of life...
...we can smell on the breeze the odor of heliotrope and mignonette and hear the call of the waterfowl and the "churr" of the night hawk...
...As we pace the terrace of Brockhurst with its youthful mistress we can see its outlines as they "showed dark against the fading rose of the western sky...
...and it is the invincible light of Catholic truth that beckons the knight-errant, Dominic Iglesias, on to the far horizon...
...For the air of it is for the most part that of "la belle France...
...Nothing short of genius could have placed in juxtaposition the characters of Poppy St...
...It is that mysterious something that welds together characters and phraseology and dramatic content, making of the whole a literary masterpiece...
...The Church, her claims, her life, her Sacraments provide the entire background against which the hero's life is set...
...Lovegrove remarks that "actresses are all very well in the theatre, I daresay, tut they are out of place in private houses...
...Harrison's reserve on this point, and as a consequence when one harks back to Adrian Savage it is to the characters that one looks and not to the plot...
...Twice I have read Sir Richard Calmady, and more than twice I have returned to it, as one turns to an old friend in whose seasoned wisdom one is sure of solace...
...Thomas Hardy...
...Religion, it is commonly taken for granted by our American reading public, is entitled to a role of no greater literary import than in the drama is assigned to the parlor maid who dusts the furniture or the butler who gravely announces that "dinner is served, your Ladyship...
...Newman had retired to Littlemore, and but three short years were to elapse ere he and a number of his disciples should follow the "kindly 66o THE COMMONWEAL April 21, 1926 light" that led them to eternal truth...
...as when the corpulent Mrs...
...Seldom since the Barset stories has the stodgy English middle-class been so pitilessly exposed to view as by the creator of Serena Lovegrove, Eliza Hart, and Dr...
...Harrison without feeling that it reflects some of the fine adventures of soul of the woman who wrote it, for the date of its publication, 1901, precedes by two years that of its author's reception into the Catholic Church...
...Margaret, her frankly materialistic sister, who announces her intention of throwing over Unitarianism for the Establishment because of the social prestige afforded by the latter and because Unitarians are "always living up to their own cleverness in not believing...
...Harrison had become a Catholic...
...Judged by ordinary standards it is hard to account for the popular acceptance of The Far Horizon, published in 1907, four years after Mrs...
...Is it the perfection of its English that sets the book apart...
...Few in the entire range of our literature have pictured so clearly and with such fidelity the mise en scene of the English manor house...
...No one would dream of finding fault with the literary competence that distinguishes Tess of the D'Ubervilles...
...So many literary crimes have been committed in the name of the "psychological" that one hesitates to make use of the term...
...In Sir Richard Calmady's deformity his incomparable mother finds as noble an opportunity for championship as man or woman could well ask...
...It is cleverly subserved, moreover, to exigencies of plot and characterization...
...called forth the sublime Apologia, should have made just past her fiftieth milestone the change, so momentous to all converts, that was henceforth to number her with the coreligionists of the great Cardinal...
...and it does make them awfully hind-leggy and boring...
...Indeed, there is just a little weakness in Mrs...
...To Catholics these three novels by Lucas Malet should be especially significant, as mirroring in their depths—now as touched with shadow as a forest pool, now as glancing with ripples as a wave that is breaking on a sandy beach—the philosophy of a soul that has first known spiritual conflict...
...We are sure that Poppy St...
...Of all portraitures he is one of the most perfect of his class...
...If a priori opinion were* demanded it would very likely be said, quite unhesitatingly, that The Far Horizon could and would be put out by none but a publisher of distinctively Catholic books...
...waiting, not hopelessly, but in the expectation that the dawning of another day will bring with it far richer gifts...
...then joy...
...Nevington, the pompous bishop designate...
...How," it may be asked, "can you possibly praise or recommend a book in which there occur so many passages that are revoltingly realistic...
...For forty-five years, from her birth at Eversley rectory in 1852 to her husband's death in 1897, Lucas Malet must surely have come to an extensive knowledge of life as it is lived in the "vine-clad vicarages" of the Establishment...
...The ending of the journey, as it came to Dominic in the old house on Holland Street, may disappoint the expectations of those who maintain that "everything always comes out all right in the long run...
...In the hands of a bungler they would have been puppets and puppets only, responding to the string pulled at the proper time, creatures of forced speech and stilted movement...
...In doing so it may be helpful to institute a comparison between it and what is generally conceded to be the greatest, or one of the greatest, works of another modern, Mr...
...This third in my row of these novels has the date 1911, with the imprint of Harpers opposite the frontispiece, and the blue and gold of its covers is, in its way, eloquent...
...The difference lies in the fact that one contains the germ of hope that faith, if but partial faith, supplies, while the other deals with lives that have it not...
...When we gather with the family in the vaulted chapel, where lamps glow and flowers scatter fragrance on the air, we can look down the line of stalls and see the serious faces etched against the half-darkness: Katherine Calmady and Honoria St...
...It is done in a few lines, but they are lines that thrust rapier-like into the vitals of Victorian respectability...
...Is it, then, its finely dramatic quality that draws us to Sir Richard Calmady—the pages of the musty chapbook, with their coarse but powerful delineation of an earlier Calmady's amour and its tragic sequel—or Julius March, the ascetical, pale-faced Tractarian, selfdiscovered at length and carrying to the last the secret of a great love locked in a loyal heart...
...or when Serena the spinster says of her sister Susan: uShe always has a large appetite, and so have all her friends...
...Its storm-racked pages project one through to the very end with a fatalism that is devastating, almost cyclonic, impervious to pleading or to pity, and the curtain falls on a tragedy that leaves us none the wiser for its enactment...
...Leger feminism is never more than a movement...
...And just here we encounter an objection...
...But Gabrielle St...
Vol. 3 • April 1926 • No. 24
