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Introduction

Mary webb had that always fascinating quality of genius—imaginative energy. It is a quality so precious that, when an author possesses it, the waves of criticism beat against his work in vain. It appears in a hundred different forms, and is the immortal soul alike of the romances of Dumas, the seventy-times-seven-to-be-forgiven, as Henley called him, and of the novels of Victor Hugo, who needs our forgiveness even more often. Dickens, possessing it, made us believe in the existence of a vast population of men and women in whom we should have believed under no other compulsion, and Hans Andersen, possessing it, endowed a tin soldier with greater reality for us than the thirty tyrants of Athens. Spellbound by it, we accept Emily Brontë’s vision of life in Wuthering Heights. There are other qualities as enchanting in literature—wisdom, humour, and observation without fear or favour—but there is no other quality that, by itself, exercises such power over us.

I do not suppose that many of the admirers of the work of Mary Webb—and they were a larger multitude during her lifetime than is generally realized—if asked to express an opinion as to which is the best of her books, would name Seven for a Secret. Yet in its pages what a tempestuous energy storms through that landscape ‘between the dimpled lands of England and the gaunt purple steeps of Wales—half in Faery and half out of it!’ Gillian Lovekin, the farmer’s daughter, may be a fool from the beginning—a greater fool, indeed, than Mary Webb supposed her to be—but at least she is a fool to whom we can no more be indifferent than we can be indifferent to a gale that blows a house down. Not that Gillian is magnificently ruinous: she is no Helen of Troy. She is petty even in the magnitude of her ambition—as petty as a parish Hedda Gabler. She has, when we meet her first, no real ambition, except to be a greater Gillian Lovekin and to escape from the farm that is too small a stage for her. If she is intent on learning to sing or to play the harp, it is not because she wishes to succeed as an artist so much as because she wishes to triumph over her fellow-creatures. ‘I want,’ she confesses frankly to her cowman worshipper, ‘to draw tears out of their eyes and money out of their pockets.’ ‘She wanted,’ we are told, ‘to make men and women hear her, love her, rue her.’ It is probably a common enough daydream of egotists of both sexes, and with most of them it remains a daydream. But Gillian put her egotism into practice, and began by causing the death of the elderly gentleman who wooed her aunt with readings from Crabbe and by the end of the story has caused a murder.

The story would have been a sordid one if Mary Webb, with her imaginative and fantastic gifts, had not exalted it into a tale of the conflict between light and the powers of darkness in a setting in which Gillian’s lover’s house is like a refuge of the sun, and the house to which her husband takes her is a predestined habitation of evil spirits. Mr. W. B. Yeats once declared, when defending Synge’s ‘Playboy,’ that art is ‘exaggeration à propos,’ and Seven for a Secret is written in a vein of noble and appropriate exaggeration. Here men are stronger than common men: they are nature’s giants, as they woo Gillian to the thunder of hoofs, galloping bareback past her house in a breakneck fury. The atmosphere of ‘The Mermaid’s Rest,’ Gillian’s home after marriage, again, is like that of an ogre’s castle, with the beautiful dumb woman-servant as an imprisoned princess, and the monkey-like, toothless, hilarious Fringal as a gnome abetting his master in evil. In the dumb girl and in Fringal it is as though a beautiful and a hideous grotesque had stepped out of the pages of Hugo into an English landscape. Mary Webb has in this book created her characters in a high fervour of the romantic spirit.

This in a novelist is possibly more important than psychology. At least, when it is present, we are less likely to be critical of an author’s psychology. We may wonder whether Gillian, at an hour when she was deep in love with Robert Rideout, would have yielded so easily to Elmer on the night of the fair at Weeping Cross, but our doubts are lost in the romance of her subsequent sufferings and salvation—salvation that comes only after she has drawn the secret of her husband’s past, letter by letter, from Rwth, the dumb woman, and the secret has cost Rwth her life. We may not quite believe that Gillian, the egotist, when she finally found safety in Robert Rideout’s arms, whispered to him: ‘Oh, Robert! Robert! The powers of darkness have lost their hold, and I’m not a child of sin any more’; but because of the vehement good faith with which the fable has been told, we do not quarrel with the author for putting into Gillian’s mouth a sentence that rounds it off like a moral.

If it is necessary to classify novelists—and we all attempt to do it—Mary Webb must be put in a class that contains writers so different as Emily Brontë and Thomas Hardy, for whom the earth is predominantly a mystery-haunted landscape inhabited by mortals who suffer. To class her with these writers is not to claim that she is their equal: all that we need claim is that her work is alive with the fiery genius of sympathy, pity and awe. There is scarcely a scene in Seven for a Secret that some touch of poetic observation does not keep alive in the memory. The characters, as I have suggested, may seem at times a little fabulous, but with what a poetic intensity of emotion she compels us to believe in the scenes in which they take part! It is not too much, indeed, to say that in her writings fiction became a branch of poetry—a flowering branch that will still give pleasure for many years to come.

ROBERT LYND