The New York herald., 1922-09-17


EBECCA VESTS literary back
N ground is not the least interesting
thing about her first long novel,
'The Judge" and for the reader attentive
to her from her earliest beginnings it is
an irresistible approach to her latest book.
field ten years ago achieved as many re-
actions as a very young person in high
revolt against everything could well de-
sire. In the short lived but valiant Lon
don Freeiconidn she began her gayly bitter
attacks upon anything with some luckless
new book as the text. Marriage, the home,
man. the social state and the psychology
OF woman were parlous subjects for her
encountered novelists to handle, for her
critical criterion was her rebeldom against
all these established things, never by any
chance the aesthetic reaction to the book
in hand. Life, not art, concerned her.
Now we have "The Judge" in length
and subject and serious intention really
novel. Every mother is a judge who
sentences the children for the sins of the
father" Book l. is the story of Ellen
lighted father, her lover, Richard Yaver-
land, their betrothal and her mothers
death. Book III. is the story of Marian
Richards mother, from her childhood to
her death, and, all briefly, the violent end
to Ellen's love- an ending which begins
again the round of life.
From beginning to end the book holds
that he reads two stories instead of one
All the time two separate actions are
going on which never come together
With so much material, such avid SINGER
ity in the working with it and, in ways
impossible to define, so much evidence of
tortured labor on the authors part to bring
the two stories of 1.-THE Judge" together,
curiosity mounts with the reiterated
queries of how and why the longed for
NEEDING of the two never comes off.
The first question is not so hard to an
swer. The answer begins with the read
er's first amazement over the chosen way
to give him Marian's story. All through
Book l. it is Elen's vague sensings of
Richards mystery and his held secret of
his mothers mystery which builds up
through her wondering ignorance, vivid
interest in the unknown Marian as well
as all the data needed to carry the reader
eagerly over into the second half Through
Ellen's gropings, bewilderments and Curl
osities-above all through the given inn
portance that she feel her way through
the tangle-the reader is feeling his way
into the heart of the mystery; she makes
for Book l., vivid divining rod for the
depths beneath Richards life
And suddenly, well into Book IL and
of Marian Yaverland's story, he realizes
blankly, that no use is being made of
Ellens prepared 'consciousness"-let us
grow Jamesian for the moment remem-
bering Rebecca Vests long abiding with
Henry James and her volume on his work
Marian's whole story comes to us at last
by way of hundred pages of her own
eating memories during five hours of
sleepless night She is permitted to leave
the bewildered Ellen and, locked within
her own room to remember from the
beginning. Her violent end follows swiftly
and the fine details of her story are only
most curious and technically tragic "aside"
to the reader.
Arid yet at the end as Ellen stands
olling across at the island of brief refuge
for her and Richard, wondering whether
son or daughter awaited her there"
she is-we feel it in spite of the evidence
somehow a. are of the whole of Marians
story. She was worthy to be and deserved
to be; her valiant story fails of its full
value If size is not. But as the story is
nraSented all the essential facts ara divine,