CHILDREN DECRY THE FATHERS

Radio Record, 27 May 1938, Page 34

CHILDREN DECRY THE FATHERS

NE of youth’s dearest privileges is to be able to poke out its tongue at the back of its elders. That little surreptitious gesture of independence is a great balm for the pains of mind and body inflicted by people who are bigger and stronger, and say they are wiser As it is with individuals just so, it seems, is it with generations of individuals. For there was never yet an age of Englishmen that did not despise or pity the manners and thinking of its immediate forbears-no matter how ready at the same time to bow down in worship of a lot of disreputable early ancestors whose chief virtue was the dust of centuries that bad made them legendary. This British trait of character may be partly the reason why, in post-war years, the Victorian age hag been the butt of so much svorn. The men and women who were children at the close of Victoria’s reign have had no mercy on the stufliness, the hypocrisy, the infuriating "smuggery" of their parents and grand-parents. In revenge for being repressed in youth, when they grew up they set the whole world laughing at the sex-phobias, the aspidistras and "vapours" of Victorianism, No doubt this eastigation was healthy and often justified. Nevertheless, those mocking children of the Golden Age have rather made us lose sight of much thar was good and sound, or merely human, under the frills of 1900. Silly and hidebound as those people of thirty and fifty years ago may hays been, yet at root they were still people, with all the doubts and despairs and leaping hopes of people everywhere, in all the ages, What literature needs now is not so much about the facade of Victorianism. but a good deal more about the yulnerable heart beneath. It is time the spotlight moved from the Age to the men and women who Jived, feared and struggled in it. Latest author to tackle this immense and difficult subject--and largely to fail-is Phyllis Bentley, whose "Sleep in Peace" is an attempt to portray her own generation: that generation which "made the transition from Victorian England-industrial, expanding, pious, a Great Power and proud of it--to the confused revolts and loyalties of today." In some ways, one might have thought Miss Bentley’s distinctive method, with its dependence upon the mass effect of piled detail, would baye snited the theme. But Miss Bentley, like so many others before her, is too close to Victorianism to see it wholels. And no amount of literary skill or honesty can overcome that handicap. "Sleep in Peace" deals with the dissimiliar families of Wincheliffe and Armisiead, living in an industrial town in.the West Riding, drawn unwillingly together by circumsiance and strangely held in union, despite themselves.

The picture we are given of them ig complete and no doubt accurate. But for all that, even 560 pages of close print are not sufficient to bring about a dozen characters to full and vivid life, with the result that everyone in the novel-eyen Laura Armistead, the mild-hearted potterer in art with whom we spend most time-is insipid and pale-blooded and vaguely unbelievable. As a picture of an important and strongly-marked era, "Sleep in Peace" is an interesting, painstaking and strikingly honest piece of work. As 2 novel, it holds interest only in the early stages, and thereafter cries aloud for the presence of at least one character sympathetically drawn or one situation humorously conceived. "Sleep in Peace," by Phyllis Bentley. (Victor Gollancz, London). Our copy from thé publishers: