The Winds of the World (Paperback)

Description

When the Duchess of Sutherland’s first book, “One Hour and the Next”, appeared, we felt, and we said, that in spite of many defects it disclosed qualities fully to warrant a second attempt. The second attempt has been made and the result has justified our conclusion. From any but a purely artistic point of view the “Winds of the World” is a less ambitious and generally a less important book than the story of the Potteries strike. In that book the author was dealing with places and people she knew and understood, bringing unusually acute powers of observation to bear on social questions she had watched at first hand, questions of which too many of her order, and even more of the intermediate class, are only too profoundly ignorant. Unfortunately artistic defects, resulting from lack of literary experience, caused the form into which she elected to throw her observation and reflection to be an insuperable bar to their due effect. So that on the whole it must be confessed that “One Hour and the Next ” was a failure. In her second book the Duchess of Sutherland has rejected all the adventitious assistance which the choice of a subject in a sense special to herself might have given her, electing to take her stand on the claims of pure art. Certainly the love-story can give no assistance to one who tells it badly, for it is the commonplace of every novelist, and almost every poet, from the genius to the hack, from the artist to the charlatan. It is true the love platitude is an attraction to the average fool and induces the popularity that comes of bad writing; but in the educated reader it raises every I prejudice against the writer. It is almost an offence to the intelligent man that anyone should suppose he could have anything to tell him on this ancient theme that he has not heard before far oftener than he desired. Lovemaking to all but the interested parties is irritating enough in fact; what excuse, is there, for multiplying this irritation in fancy? It is natural to revenge exclusion from another (and two others’) paradise by deeming it the paradise of a fool. But haw is such an attitude to admit of sympathy; and if you cannot sympathise with the reality as seen in the flesh, how is an author to make you sympathise with the imitation as shown on paper? Thus the Duchess of Sutherland has subjected herself to the severest artistic test, the test which, to judge from her previous literary work, would find out her weakest points. It is as though she deliberately challenged the critic on his own ground. Therefore it is with especial pleasure that we say without hesitation that the first (in order) of these seven love stories shows that what seemed at first sight sheer temerity was real courage. As to the other stories we need stop only to express, in passing, our regret at the cheap melodramatic ending of the “Laureate” and cordially to endorse the sentiment of the “Laureate’s” friend that “Illicit love has really had its turn in literature”. We wish he could have said “its day”. In “The Fate that Follows” we are from the first on a higher plane both of workmanship and thought. The story s told with a restraint, a reticence, a compression that fills the reader with the force of the intense emotion which is its motive. The severe style admirably suits both the setting of the story, the grey little seaport with its rough and somewhat squalid inhabitants, and its theme, an honest love, on the grand threshold of a happy life, suddenly ruined by an accident which is a crime. The lovers are left face to face with their blank future, their whole life suddenly mortified in the dead body at their feet, the body of the murdered worthless mother, the spectre of their love all through, comeback just in time to spoil their lives. The horror of the blind father’s recognition of his deserting wife, whom he knows again only as the ballet-girl of his youth, is appalling; and the more so that it is depicted without any sensationalism…