Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/529

Rh Old Home to which he takes Ellen (for they get engaged at once, of course, and her mother dies).

Miss West shows her great gift for comedy in the early part of this book, but she is determined to make a tragedy, and having read Freud, she knows that where there is tragedy, there must be a neurosis. She remembers her Greek Tragedies, her Lear, and her Phèdre, finds the complex she wants, but falls, I think, too completely under its domination, allowing it to tyrannize over the second part of her book. The first part was getting on so nicely without it. Still, whereas her former novel introduced a practitioner of the new psychotherapy and all its terminology, now she uses the material without the jargon—a better method for fiction.

The Judge, Part II; the big skies of Essex; the mud-flats of the Thames Estuary, and Richard's mother, Marion, "a dark, silent, sledge-hammer of a woman," living too intensely, in a too personal house. Ellen suffers from it; so do we. For Marion is possessed by the horrors of her past life, and keeps not only herself, but all who come near her, including ourselves, living over again in imagination her tragical experiences. All night she lies awake suffering from old wounds that have never healed, remembering how she was seduced by the Young Squire, and stoned (improbably enough) by the village boys, when about to become an Unmarried Mother, and how then she accepted as a protection the name of the Young Squire's butler, on the understanding that the marriage should remain nominal. The old story, you think? The butler wins her love, no doubt, and proves that kind hearts are more than coronets, and pantry skill than Norman blood? Wrong again! Mr Peacey (that is his name) violates his contract and his wife; the Squire's son is given a contemptible little brother, and we are in the middle of a home as uncomfortable as Wuthering Heights or the House of Atreus. The brothers hate each other; the mother hates her Peacey child, and hates herself for hating him; while for Richard, her son by the Squire, her love is violent and extreme; in fact

This is the pivot of the tragedy. Ellen is faced with this frantic woman as a prospective mother-in-law, and noble and well-intentioned as they both are, they naturally cannot hit it off. Disaster fol-