Part 23 (2/2)

He can perform no , a strange jealousy awakes and grows in hiony whenever Gianni touches a trapeze Gianni discovers this and renounces his art

Now here in the first place it is to be noted that the whole story depends upon the circus profession, and the brothers' love for it and desire to excel in it The catastrophe; Nello's jealousy; Gianni's self-sacrifice; are inseparable from the atmosphere of the book The catastrophe is a professional catastrophe; the jealousy a professional jealousy; the sacrifice a sacrifice of a profession And in the second place we know, even if we had not his oord for it, that M de Goncourt--contrary to his habit--deliberately etherealized the ats He calls his tale an essay in poetic realism, ”Je me suis trouve dans une de ces heures de la vie, vieillissantes, oisseux de mes autres livres, en un etat de l'ame ou la verite trop vraie m'etait antipathique a ination dans du reve mele a du souvenir” We know from the Goncourt Journals exactly what is meant by ”du souvenir” We know that M Ede of the circus-ring and sy in the story of Gianni and Nello the story of his own literary collaboration with his brother Jules--a collaboration of quite singular intimacy, that ceased only with Jules's death in 1870 Possibly, as M Zola once suggested, M Edmond de Goncourt did at first intend to depict the circus-life, after his wont, in true ”naturalistic” : but ”par une delicatesse qui s'explique, il a recule devant le milieu brutal de cirques, devant certaines laideurs et certaines es qu'il choisis-sait” The two facts reanno_ M de Goncourt (1) made professional life in a circus the very blood and tissue of his story; and (2) that he softened the details of that life, and to a certain degree idealized it

Turning to Mrs Woods's book and taking these two points in reverse order, we find to begin with that she idealizes nothing and softens next to nothing Where she does soften, she softens only for literary effect--to give a word its due force, or a picture its proper values

She does not, for instance, accurately report the oaths and blasphemies:--

”The tents and booths of the shoere disappearing rapidly like stage scenery The red-faced Manager, Joe, and several others in authority, ran hither and thither shouting their orders to a crowd of work rolls of canvas, and heavy chests, and gons Others were harnessing the big powerful horses to the carts, horses that were e red collars The scene was so busy, so full ofhad not the freshair been full of senseless blasphemies and other deformities of speech, uttered casually and constantly, without any apparent consciousness on the part of the speakers that they were using strong language Probably the lady who dropped toads and vipers from her lips whenever she opened them came in process of time to consider them the usual accoreat ainst copious profanity of speech

Here you have the artistic reason, and, by implication, that which forbids its use in literature--nah she selects, Mrs Woods does not refine She exhibits the life of the travelling show in its habitual squalor as well as in its occasional brightness How she has : but her book leaves the impression of confident fae notas we do that Mrs Woods was not brought up in a circus, we infer that she must have spent much labor in research: but, taken by itself, her book perenuine artist no line can be drawn between knowledge and iination

Probably--alift which Mr Henry Jaive it an inch takes an ell, and which for an artist is a th than any accident of residence or of place in the social scalethe power to guess the unseen froe the whole piece by the pattern; the condition of feeling life in general so co a particular corner of it” Be this as it may, Mrs Woods has written a novel which, for mastery of an unfamiliar _milieu_, is almost fit to stand beside _Esther Waters_

I say ”alh Mrs Woods's mastery is easier and less conscious than Mr Moore's, it neither goes so deep to the springs of action nor bears so intimately on the conduct of the story But of this later

If one thing hly realized these queer characters of hers, it is that she makes them so much like other people Whatever our profession enerally silent upon the instincts that led us to adopt it--unless, indeed, we happen to be writers andout of self-analysis So these strollers are silent upon the attractiveness of their calling But they crave as openly as any of us for distinction, and they worshi+p ”respectability” as heartily and outspokenly as any of the country-folk for whose amusement they tumble and pull faces It is no small merit in this book that it reveals how much and yet how very little divides the perfor from the audience in the sixpenny seats I wish I had space to quote a particularly fine passage--you will find it on pp 72-74--in which Mrs Woods describes the progress of thesewhite horses with their red collars, the painted vans, the cages ”where bears paced uneasily and strange birds thrust uncouth heads out into the sunshi+ne,” the two elephants and the calish hedges, the hermetically sealed omnibus in which the artistes bumped and dozed, while the wardrobe-woes of birth, house-rent, and furniture, which made her discomforts of real iht be”

But in bringing her Vagabonds into relation with ordinary English life, Mrs Woods loses all, or nearly all, of that esoteric professional interest which, at first sight, would see circus people to write about The story of _Les Freres Zeanno_ has, as I have said, this esoteric professional interest The story of _The Vagabonds_ is the story of a husband and of a young ho does not love him, but discovers that she loves another man--a story as old as the hills and co Mrs Woods has irl with strict notions about respectability, and the lover, Fritz, a handsoymnast But there was no fundaht be every bit as true of a grocer, and a grocer's wife, and a grocer's assistant Once or twice, indeed, in the earlier chapters we have promise of a more peculiar story e read of Mrs Morris's objection to seeing her husband play the clown ”No woht up to the business would like to see her husband look like that” And of Joe Morris we read that he took an artistic pride in his clowning But there follows no serious struggle between love and art--no such struggle, for instance, as Zola has worked out to tragic issues in his _L'uvre_ Mrs Morris's shahtens the contrast in her eyes between hih the circus-business is not essential, Mrs Woods makes most effective use of it I will select one notable illustration of this

When Mrs Morris at length ht--the unhappy husband wraps her up carefully in her bed and creeps aith his grief to the barn where Chang, a ferocious elephant amenable only to him, has been stabled:--

”He opened the door; the barn was pitch dark, but as he entered he could hear the noise of the chain which had been fastened to the elephant's legs being suddenly dragged He spoke to Chang, and the noise ceased Then running up a short ladder which was close to the door, he threw himself down on the straw and stared up into the darkness, which to his aching eyes seeled withwar him on the face

”'Who's there?' he called out

”There was no answer, but the soft thing, soly all over

”'Oh, it's you, Chang, lad to haveabout yer, are yer sure?

No lies?'”

The circus-business is eain in the catastrophe: but, to , there re ridiculous in the spectacle of an injured husband, armed with a Winchester rifle andhis wife's lover by ” hirotesque: but I think it is so more

The problem of the story is the commonest in fiction And when I add that the injured husband has been married before and that his first wife, honestly supposed to be dead, returns to threaten his happiness, you will see that Mrs Woods sets forth upon a path trodden by many hundreds of thousands of incoests bravado If it be bravado, it is entirely justified as the tale proceeds: for amid the crowd of failures Mrs

Woods's solution wears the singular distinction of truth That the book is written in restrained and beautiful English goes without saying: but the best tribute one can pay to the writing of it is to say that its style and its truthfulness are at one If coainst truth--that it leaves one a trifle cold A less perfect story ht have aroused es that tell of Joe Morris's final surrender of his wife--with their justness of iination and sobriety of speech--for any amount of pity and terror

A word on the few es in the book Mrs

Woods's scene-painting has all a Frenchman's acco and intie of the phenomena of ”out-of-doors” which a Frenchh not, perhaps, her strongest gift, it is the one by which she stands most conspicuously above her contemporaries The more credit, then, that she uses it so teabonds_ By Margaret L Woods London: Smith, Elder & Co