THE NOVELS OF HENRY GREEN
495
inability to sustain their vision for more than a quaint passage here
and there. Yet the
whole
of
Caught
is made lurid by the freakish
character of the fire officer;
Loving
is a kind of particolored mosaic
in which the quirks, the ignorances, the perversities of the servants
are not simply described but actually describe themselves, are both
the matter and the manner of the whole book. In
Back
Charlie's
obstinate error of mistaken identity so colors his vision that the whole
panorama of postwar England is seen from a strange and hallu–
cinatory angle.
In fact the analogies which I used to exhibit Henry Green as
a spectator are useful but incomplete. For he is also a participant.
Poised aloft he not only surveys the scalps of his victims, but is able
to become himself a scalp. This is due to his astonishing gift of dis–
passionate sympathy, in the most literal sense of the word. When
Charlie, the returned soldier, observes the world through the colored
spectacles of his obsession, his creator is also behind those spectacles,
sharing and encouraging that peculiar but illuminating vision. Green's
ultimate limitation (every novelist has one ) is that his activity, both
as spectator and as participant, is fundamentally lacking in human
passion. His books are exquisite, subtle and entrancing, but they re–
main a brilliant exercise. At times he
simulates
tenderness with an
astonishing and deceptive skill, but the final effect is almost frigid.
We have been fascinated and convinced by Pye, by Charlie, by
Raunce the butler; these figures have revealed to us a new dimension
of human experience, but they have not moved us as we are moved,
for example, by the far more conventional creatures of Forster. Indeed
it might be helpful to regard Henry Green as the perfect complement
to Forster. He is a subtler, a more sophisticated, a more magical
writer, but, owing to his lack of either passion or compassion, he
does not enter into the substance of our lives as Forster does. He has
instructed us in new uses of the pure imagination, clarified and en–
riched our sensual understanding of the world, but he has neither tried
to achieve nor accidentally achieved a moral effect.
This becomes clearer in his last novel than in any of the three
I have been considering. In some ways
Concluding
is the most
reussi
of all his books. Approximately, it is concerned with an English girls'
school
in
the country, and the events would appear to be taking place
some time in the
nineteen~seventies
or eighties.
An
old retired profes-
