Dr. Anderson explains to the family that Christopher's amnesia is the manifestation of a suppressed wish and that hisunconscious self is refusing to let him resume his relations with his normal life. He forgot his life with his wife because he was discontented, and there was no justification for it for “Kitty was the falsest thing on earth, in tune with every kind of falsity.” The doctor proposes psychoanalysis, but Margaret says she knows a memory so strong that it will recall everything else, in spite of his discontent, the memory of the boy, his only child who had died five years before. Dr. Anderson urges her to take Christopher something the boy had worn, some toy they used to play with. So she takes a jersey and ball and meets Chris in the garden where there is only a column of birds swimming across the lake of green light that lays before the sunset, and as Chris gazes at Margaret mothering them in her arms the scales fall from his eyes and he makes obeisance to convention and bids his creative libidoau revoir.
Jenny is witness of the transformation and when Kitty asks “How does he look?” she answers, though her tongue cleaves to the roof of her mouth, “Every inch a soldier.”
When Miss West next essayed fiction in “The Judge” it was the diagnosis of the creative urge that was her theme. It is one of Freud's contentions that the male child, before it hears the voice of conscience and the admonition of convention, has carnal yearnings for the mother, the female child for the father. With the advent of sense, with the development of individuality, with the recognition of obligation to others, and particularly with the acquisition of the sense of morality, these are replaced with what are called normal desires. In some instances the transformation does not take place. The original trend remains, and it is spoken of as an infantile fixation. Its juvenile and adult display is called sin ethically and crime socially.
The wages of sin still is death, according to Miss West's portrayal, but it is not called sin. It is merely behaviourism interpreted in the light of the New Psychology.
“Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of the father” is her thesis. As a work of art “The Judge” has elicited much praise. As a human document, a mirror held up to actual life, a statement of the accepted facts of heredity and of behaviour, and of the dominancy and display of passion, lust, jealousy, anger, revenge, I doubt that it merits unqualified approbation.
Marion Yaverland, daughter of a Kentish father and a French mother, had yielded without compunction to the wooing of the local squire and had borne a child, Richard, around whose development, personality, and loving the story is built.
“Vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his parents' passion. He had been begotten when beauty, like a strong goddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and mother, hence beauty would disclose more of her works to him than to other sons of men with whose begetting she was not concerned.”
“Vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his parents' passion. He had been begotten when beauty, like a strong goddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and mother, hence beauty would disclose more of her works to him than to other sons of men with whose begetting she was not concerned.”
But the goddess did not give him straight genesic endowment, so he was not able to keep filial love and carnal love in their proper channels. And from this flowed all the tragedy. His mother realised his infirmity, though she didn't look upon it as an infirmity, from the earliest days; and, unfortunately, she did not attempt to eradicate it—if it is ever eradicable.
Squire Harry behaved badly to Marion, save financially, and public opinion backed up by a stoning in the streets (a real Old Testament touch) by a moron and his more youthful companions, made her accept an offer of marriage from the squire's butler, a loathsome creature called Peacey. In proposing marriage and promising immunity to its obligations he said:
“Marion, I hope you understand what I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you to marry me. But not to be my wife. I never would bother you for that. I'm getting on in life, you see, so that I can make the promise with some chance of keeping it.”
“Marion, I hope you understand what I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you to marry me. But not to be my wife. I never would bother you for that. I'm getting on in life, you see, so that I can make the promise with some chance of keeping it.”
But Peacey deceived no one save Marion. Miss West's description of the one visit of violence which he made to his wife, and which was followed in due time by Roger, whom Richard hated from birth, is a bit of realism that in verisimilitude has rarely been excelled. Roger was a pasty, snivelling, rhachitic child who developed into a high-grade imbecile of the hobo type, and finally managed to filter through the Salvation Army owing to some filter paper furnished by his mother that bore the legend “For the Govtand Compaof the Bank of England.”
From earliest childhood Richard and his mother both realised that their intimacy was unnatural and unpromising for happiness. When he was two years old
“He used to point his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he did at flowers, and he would roll his face against the smooth skin of her neck and shoulders; and when he was naked after his bath he liked her to let down her hair so that it hung round him like a dark, scented tent.”
“He used to point his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he did at flowers, and he would roll his face against the smooth skin of her neck and shoulders; and when he was naked after his bath he liked her to let down her hair so that it hung round him like a dark, scented tent.”
Poor little monster, how unfortunate that he could not then have been given a hormone that would extrovert his budding perversion!
“She always changed her dress for tea, and arranged her hair loosely like a woman in a picture, and went out into the garden to gather burning leaves and put them in vases about the room, and when it fell dark she set lighted candles on the table because they were kinder than the lamp to her pain-flawed handsomeness and because they kept corners of dusk in which these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty that she and Richard liked. She would arrange all this long before Richard came in, and sit waiting in a browse of happiness, thinking that really she had lost nothing by being cut off from the love of man for this was very much better than anything she could have had from Harry.”
“She always changed her dress for tea, and arranged her hair loosely like a woman in a picture, and went out into the garden to gather burning leaves and put them in vases about the room, and when it fell dark she set lighted candles on the table because they were kinder than the lamp to her pain-flawed handsomeness and because they kept corners of dusk in which these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty that she and Richard liked. She would arrange all this long before Richard came in, and sit waiting in a browse of happiness, thinking that really she had lost nothing by being cut off from the love of man for this was very much better than anything she could have had from Harry.”
Somewhat like the way the daughter of Senator Metellus Celere, called by some Claudia and by others Lesbia, arranged the visits of Catullus.
When Richard was sixteen he forced life's hand and leapt straight from boyhood into manhood by leaving school where he had shown great promise in science, and becoming a sailor so that he should be admirable to his mother. His wanderings took him to South America where he had great success in affairs of the heart and of the purse. It is with disposition of the latter that the book opens in the office of a lubricitous old Scotch solicitor where sits a young red-haired temperamental suffragette whimpering for the moon.
Ellen Melville is a lovable Celt of seventeen, and her creator displays a comprehensive insight into her mind and emotions. She is what Rebecca West once was and wished to be. It is sad that the pathway of her life leads so early to theVia Duraand that Richard Yaverland had not tarried in Vienna or Zurich to be psychoanalysed.
Richard falls in love with her at first sight. He woos her ardently, though simply, and she responds like a “nice” girl, like a girl who feels that for the endowment of that most wondrous thing in the world, the cerebral cortex, it is vouchsafed her to exercise restraints and make inhibitions which insects and animals cannot. In the highest sense she is rational and instinctive.
Ellen goes south to visit her future mother-in-law and a few days later Richard joins them. Roger meanwhile has “found Jesus,” and Poppy, a Salvation Army lassie, one stage removed from “Sin.” While knocking at Marion's door to gain entry that they may announce their intention to marry, their gaze floats upward and they see Ellen being kissed by the man to whom she will be married in three months. Roger, who is instinctive but not rational, puts a wrong interpretation upon it, and from that mal-interpretation the final tragedy flows. A few days later Marion realises there is no happiness for Richard and Ellen so long as she lives. She walks out into the marshes. Roger accuses Richard of driving his mother to it “because she saw that there was something wrong betweenyou two.” He elaborates the accusation, and Richard drives a bread-knife into Roger's heart.
Richard knows his doom is sealed. So he invites Ellen to share a cattlemen's hut with him on the farther side of the creek where his mother had drowned herself, until the people come to take him—and to share it comprehensively.
“Her love had not been able to reach Richard across the dark waters of his mother's love and how like a doom that love had lain on him. Since life was like this she would not do what Richard asked.”
“Her love had not been able to reach Richard across the dark waters of his mother's love and how like a doom that love had lain on him. Since life was like this she would not do what Richard asked.”
But she does.
The mode in which “The Judge” is cast is noteworthy because of its novelty and of the success attending it. Here is no sequential narrative, no time-table of events in the order in which they happened. The contact of Richard and Ellen is set forth in a straightforward way, but the main thesis of the book, the Laocoon grip of mother-love on Richard is conveyed indirectly, surreptitiously, atmospherically rather than verbally. Ellen, though she is quite normal, senses it at once when she meets Marion, and the writer approximates perfection of her art most closely in narrations of the first interviews of these two women, who are as unlike as the Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady.
While this mode may not prove an obstacle to an easy grasp of the novel upon first reading by writers or critics, it is doubtful whether the casual reader for diversion will comprehend its significance without special effort and perhaps several attempts at mastering the intricacies in the development of the story. The plan which the author has adopted of beginning, in direct narrative form, with the mature life of Richard and his love for Ellen, and then revealing through retrospect and suggestion the events of his early life and that of his mother, is a tax upon the technique of any novelist. The form has been used with notable success by Miss Elizabeth Robins in“Camilla.” But Miss West has not entirely mastered its difficulties, and her failure to do so seriously mars the story.
Miss West's reputation for brilliancy has not suffered by “The Judge,” but if one were to sentence her after reading it, he would be compelled to say she is no novelist. If it is an index of her imaginative capacity, of her conception of life, of her insight into conduct, of her knowledge of behaviour, we must content ourselves with her contributions as critic and guide.
The subject of her two novels is behaviourism of sexual motivation. It is an index of the change that has taken place in Great Britain within the past ten years, a change that should be acclaimed by everyone desirous of the complete emancipation of women.
Rebecca West has leaned her ear in many a secret place where rivulets dance their wayward round, and beauty born of murmuring sound has passed into her soul, to paraphrase the words of one who, were he in the flesh, would likely not meet Miss West's entire approbation.