Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/414



AVING read only those portions of Rupert Hughes which are pasted on the sides of newsstands, I can hardly venture to discuss him with authority. Yet, if I were to form a tentative judgement on those summaries and blurbs, I should say that Mr Hughes is an author who gives us something like a society drama, with characters, plot, and setting all more or less typical of some actual stratum, or condition, in society. In this I may be entirely unjust to Mr Hughes. But in revenge I am positive that it applies to Mrs Scott, who wrote The Narrow House, and who has now made that house gratifyingly less narrow in her new novel Narcissus.

But as Mrs Scott is quite plainly a much more complex writer than Mr Hughes, one feels at the start that the juxtaposition of the two names is false. To begin with, Mr Hughes would not write like this, which I take from The Narrow House:

"The room closed them like a coffin. Their life was their own. It did not flow in from the street."

No, that is not like Mr Hughes; it is like Mr Waldo Frank. There are other passages scattered through Mrs Scott's books which show the influence of Ulysses, a strain which it is safe to suppose has never defiled our great cinema novelist. However, Mrs Scott writes:

"I'm suffering deeply, Julia. You are suffering. I see it. It is only the little person who doesn't suffer. Why do you resent me? Life is always making patterns. It has thrown us three—you and me, and your husband—into a design—a relationship to each other."

And although Mr Hughes would probably never have stepped so circumspectly around the word "triangle," it is safe to assume that the situation has occurred to him: Lawrence immersed in his chemi-