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Novels and Novelists

The Books of the Small Souls

The Books of the Small Souls

The Later Life—The Twilight of the Souls—Doctor Adriaan. — By Louis Couperus. Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

Those of us who are seriously interested in contemporary fiction cannot afford to disregard these admirably translated novels by the famous Dutch author. It is stated in an explanatory note that they can be read independently and separately, but that is, we think, to miss the peculiar interest of Mr. Couperus' achievement. True, the first book, which was published some years ago and which bears the covering title of the series ‘Small Souls,’ may be considered as complete in itself, but it is also the key to these three that follow after; and although apart from them, it may and it does strike us as very brilliant, very sensitive and amazingly vivid and fresh, it is only when we look back upon it and see it in its rightful place in relation to the others that we recognize the full significance of the qualities we admire.

We do not know anything in English literature with which to compare this delicate and profound study of a passionately united and yet almost equally passionately divided family. Little by little, by delicate stages, yet without any preliminary explanations or reserves, we are taken into the very heart of the matter. The troubling question which would seem to lie so heavy upon the pen of many a modern writer: ‘How much can I afford to take for granted? How much dare I trust to the imagination of the reader?’ is answered here. We are too often inclined to think it may be solved by technical accomplishment, but that is not enough; the reason why Mr. Couperus can afford to dismiss the question, to wave page 206 it aside and to take everything for granted, is because of the strength of his imaginative vision. By that we mean it is impossible in considering these books not to be conscious of the deep breath the author has taken; he has had, as it were, a vision of the Van Lowe family, and he has seen them as souls—small souls—at the mercy of circumstance, life, fate. He has realized that that which keeps them together, the deep impulse which unites them through everything, is apprehension. The real head of the family, the grim, ghostly shadow whose authority they never question, is Fear. So, as we speak of the idea underlying a poem, we may say that fear is the idea underlying these novels. If we listen deeply enough we can hear this unquiet heart of the Van Lowe family throbbing quickly, and it is because it is never for a moment still that the author succeeds in keeping our interest passionately engaged. We are constantly aware of the vision, the idea; it is the secret that he permits us to share with him, and in the end it seems to give way to a deeper secret still.

In the first of these four great glimpses of the Van Lowe family the home is already empty. Some of the children are married with families of their own, and all are scattered, but the mother still has the power of calling them all under her wing every Sunday evening; and here it is that we meet them all quickened, all stirring because Mamma has asked them to take back Constance, a sister who disgraced them and who has just come back from abroad because her homesickness was worse than she could bear. She has come back because she cannot exist without family life, that precious exchange of tenderness and sympathy, intimacy and ease. Her sin was that years ago, in Rome, she betrayed her elderly husband with a young Dutch nobleman, and there was a divorce. But he has been her husband for years and their son is now a big boy: Constance imagines that all is long since forgotten and forgiven. Her own family, her own sisters and brothers, could not nourish a grudge against her. In their reaction page 207 to her presence among them we have the measure of the Van Lowe family, and we learn too that her real reason for returning was not her love of them all, but that she had failed to find happiness in her second marriage and was not strong enough to face unhappiness alone.

It is astonishing with what power and certainty the author gives us, in this book, the whole complicated Van Lowe family, how he suggests their weakness under their apparent strength, their wastefulness under their apparent reserve. Paul, the exquisite, with his mania for order, and his sense of the exquisite wasted upon ties and the arrangement of his wash-hand stand; Ernst, who lavishes his pity and sensitiveness upon ancient pots and books; Dorine, whom nobody wants, spending herself upon things that do not matter, and Constance, with her longing to be loved thwarted by her jealousy and pettiness. Apart from them all there is Addie, Constance's little son, who looks at all that is happening with his grave, childish eyes and sees them as they are. This little boy, who is ten years old in the first book and is the Doctor Adriaan of the last of the series, is the hero, if hero he can be called. It is through him that Constance is received back into her family, and it is he who prevents his mother and father from making a tragedy of their lives. Until the last book he seems to be quite untouched by the terror of life and the weakness of the others. But in ‘Doctor Adriaan,’ just when we imagine that if the burden is to be lifted it will be lifted by Addie, the famous young doctor, the healer, it is quite wonderfully suggested that he too has not escaped. He feels at times a sense of dreadful insufficiency. He does not feel strong enough to stand alone, and turns to his foolish, charming father for support.

‘The Later Life’ is concerned almost entirely with the blossoming of a late love between Constance and a man as old as she, side by side with the very first early love of one of her nieces, Marienne. Under the spell of her feelings Constance becomes young again, but she does not become page 208 a girl again. Marienne, with her recklessness and her small laugh like a shake of silver bells, is cruel and violent. She must be happy; she will be happy. But Constance enters into a silent kingdom where everything is illusion and the air breathes peace. But the end, again, is like a question; it is a chord struck softly which does not close the phrase, but leaves us wondering.

In ‘The Twilight of the Soul’ the chief figure is of one of the brothers, Gerrit, a great bluff, burly, healthy brute of a fellow who is haunted by the feeling that there is a worm with legs eating up his marrow. He has a charming little wife, nine little children, and everyone knows him and loves and laughs at him, and there is that worm—confound it—burrowing away with its legs and licking up his marrow. This is an amazing, masterly study in pity and terror. It is the flaming intolerable core of the book, and round it, retreating into the same shadow as he, we have Ernst and Henri and old Mrs. Van Lowe. It is as though the menace that has threatened the family so long, the immense lukewarm family, is realized at last and the Lord spews them out of his mouth. Yet how lingeringly, with what an art are they spewed! It remains in ‘Doctor Adriaan’ to gather up all that are left and to put them in Constance's care. But with them is Addie's wife, a great insensitive young woman who has no patience with their tragedies and thinks them all half mad…. The Van Lowe family has fallen; Mathilda treads it under her heavy foot and it does not stir. Even Addie thinks it is time.

But space does not permit us to deal with these books at length. There is an angle from which we seem to see them as the strangest landscapes, small, low-lying country swept continually by immense storms of wind and rain, with dark menacing clouds for ever pulling over and casting a weighty shadow that lifts and drifts away only to fall again.

(June 18, 1920.)