Other formats

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

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Novels and Novelists

A Revival

A Revival

Legend — By Clemence Dane

Were it not for the dates (October 1917–April 1919) printed on the last page of ‘Legend’ we should have been inclined to believe that Miss Clemence Dane had taken twenty years over the writing of her quaint old-fashioned little story. The spirit, the temper, the manner, all seem to belong to that curious little collection of novels and stones by women and—one really couldn't help fancying—for women that appeared about a score of years ago. In recalling them we are amazed to discover how similar they were. It was as though the writers shared a common spirit—the spirit of sex antagonism; a temper that was half extravagant cynicism, half extravagant sentimentality; and a manner, more often than not like that of dramatic reciters, which caused us to burn with embarrassment—as if we were overhearing something which we not only had no right to hear, but which it positively was not fair to listen to. … Their world was in very truth a woman's world. If it held a genius, the genius was a woman, so was the creature of strong personality, good or bad; and of men there existed, roughly, two types; one, the brute at the mercy of his sexual appetites, and the other, the big simple child unable to feed himself or clothe himself without a woman's aid.

To read ‘Legend’ is to become acutely conscious of the great gulf that separates us from this woman's world. It is an account of how a small set of literary people living in London who are met together for one of their monthly page 119 ‘nights’ are suddenly informed that the leading spirit of their group is dead—she has died in child-bed. Thereupon Anita Serle, a great critic—‘the finest judge of style in England, so Jasper Flood says’—and the dead woman's most intimate friend, announces the fact that she is going to write a life—a Life of Madala Grey. All the facts are hers, she is the keeper of Madala's manuscripts and letters, and all through their friendship she has ‘Boswellized.’ Now, she tells them, is her hour. This Life is to be her great achievement. Fame she has, respect she has, but all through the years the critics and the public alike have denied her the title of creator; but at last—

‘I tell you I've got her, naked, pinned down, and now I shall make her again. Isn't it fair? She ought to thank me. “Dead,” he says. Who's to blame. She chose to kill herself. What right had she to take risks? I—I've refrained, she couldn't. She threw away her lamp. But I—I take it. I light it again. Finding's keeping. It's mine.’ Her voice ripped on the high note like a rag on a nail and she checked, panting….

And so they sit through the November evening, Madala Grey's friends, discussing her life, her books, her career, and wondering how she could possibly have come to marry a commonplace country doctor who cared not a jot that everyone in England had read ‘Eden Walls.’ There is Jasper Flood, seated on the floor, a brilliant cynical ultra-modern poet, who tosses us airy trifles as ‘Enlighten our darkness, dear Lady,’ or ‘Delightfullest, my thoughts are thistledown.’ At one moment the tip of his red tongue showed; at another, when childbirth was mentioned, his gaze travels slowly over Anita…. He leans against the knees of a blond lady very much made up, wearing a white shawl creeping with dragons, whose chief perplexity is how Madala managed to describe passion as she did without experience. Her voice is a purr, ‘Jasper,’ and he leans against her, playing with her rings, page 120 her draperies brushing him intimately. On a ‘pouf’ sits the Baxter girl, reeking of scent; she is a protégée of Anita's but although she knows it is as much as your literary life is worth to admire ‘sentiment,’ she is still youthful enough to love Madala Grey apart from her books. Another lady, a gushing lady—‘Damn husbands, damn publishers’—whose ‘Sir Fortinbras’ America has just rejected, is divided between admiration and love. In the background is great-aunt Serle, the ‘gaffer’ of the piece, with a prophetic forefinger, a chuckle, the air of a wise bird, a ravel of knitting. At the crisis it is she who listens for the ghostly cab-wheels bearing the ghostly Madala—? and hears them. Over by the window, his beautiful hands toying with the tassel of the blind, is a famous Royal Academy painter, Kent Rehan, who had loved Madala the woman. And in the shadows, Jennie Summers, the teller of the tale, a simple country girl who, bewildered and confused by these brilliant mechanical dolls, is hearing of Madala for the first time.

The high problem that vexes the group round the fire is how Madala Grey could have turned traitor to Art, could have thrown away her genius and delivered herself into the arms of a mere man. They cannot solve it, but Anita thinks she can explain. She has a letter, a passionate love letter written by Madala to ‘someone.’ This she thinks proves that Madala was on the point of eloping ‘without benefit of clergy,’ as she says, and that when the elopement fell through she fled to the other man for refuge. But the letter, which is to be the heart of the book, is seized by Kent Rehan, who takes it over to the fireplace, lifts a block of coal with naked hands, thrusts the paper down, and then, replacing the block of coal with naked hands, keeps it there till all is burned. This crisis is followed immediately by another in which the ghost of Madala appears to Rehan and Jennie.

Her eyes as she listened to the group by the hearth were sparkling with amusement, and that tolerant deep page 121 affection that one keeps for certain dearest, foolish friends….

And the story ends with the collapse of the artist and a small scene in which we are given to understand that he and Jennie are going to find happiness together.

If Jennie Summers, the simple country girl who tells the tale, had never come to London, if she had gone on living in the tiny country place where they were ‘too poor to afford Mudie's’ and ‘the vicar's wife sent mother the Royal Academy catalogue after she had been up to town,’ it is extremely probable that this would be her idea of the way literary people in mysterious London lived and moved; nor would it seem strange to her that a great woman should feel for them ‘that tolerant deep affection that one keeps for certain dearest, foolish friends.’ But ‘Legend’ is not a dream of Jennie Summers. Miss Dane would have us believe that the characters are important, the problem is real. Not that she asks us to admire her precious little crew round the fire; her pen is acid as she describes Anita, Jasper and his blond lady of the dragons, Miss Howe swooping and kissing the Baxter girl with open incredulous mouth; but she does demand of us that we shall believe in them. That we cannot do. Did they even exist twenty years ago, outside those passionate pages—these writers who are for ever prating about the public, their duty to the public, what the public has the right to know, and who look upon themselves as creatures dedicate for whom the common loves of husband and children could not be? Did not Miss Dane say: ‘This is what people think writers are like’—and so draw them, and ‘This is what people think a genius is like?’ For her Madala is most certainly the complete genius. Young, radiant, painted by Kent Rehan in a Liberty scarf with cowslips in her hands as ‘The Spring Song,’ she wrote her books on her own confession as the bird sings, as the wave breaks. ‘One just sits down and imagines,’ says she, and when after the publication of ‘Eden Walls,’ which is a page 122 superb realistic study of a prostitute, some unfortunate wrote to her, she was terribly distressed, because she had never thought of it being ‘real’; it was just a story! Her second book, ‘Ploughed Fields,’ contained (her friends agreed) ‘the strongest love scene of the decade,’ but for her writing was just scribbling. Away from it she was absolutely simple, childish, wanting to be loved for her self alone, talking of going ‘for a wander,’ explaining her interest in the friend of her childhood by ‘he belongs in, you know.’ And then she throws her great blazing gift away by falling in love with a man who quarrels with her for cutting a parcel string with his razors, and kisses her, while lifting her off his bicycle, in front of the kitchen windows. A genius—who could mistake her?—but a woman, too! Ay, there was the rub—there's what those hungry creatures round the fire whom she had been wont to feed with her sympathy, her genius, cannot understand; only Kent and Jennie and great-aunt Serle are capable of realizing that real love will not be denied.

But can we believe for one moment in this Royal Academy portrait of a genius? Is she not of a piece with the others? To our thinking the real problem of ‘Legend’ is why Miss Clemence Dane, turning aside from life, should have concentrated her remarkable powers upon reviving, redressing, touching up, bringing up-to-date these puppets of a bygone fashion.

(December 5, 1919.)