Rebecca West's new novel ["The Judge"] is a brilliant piece of work, forceful, impressive, haunting with a sense of instance…. Her one previous novel, her critical work, and her essays have shown her to possess a keenly probing intellect, a rich mental background and a notable gift for the art of writing. All this, in fuller, richer development and in finer quality, is evident in "The Judge," but through its pages there shines, too, the clear, unmistakable light of genius. In its insight into the deeps of human nature, and especially of feminine human nature, in its treatment of the drama of human life, in the richness of its fabric and in the force and power and skill with which it uses, for the purposes of the story, the element of personality in its characters, the novel is comparable with the work of George Eliot at her best, although falling short, in some respects, of the measure of her artistic excellence. But it is as different from her fiction as this age is different from George Eliot's period. For it is franker, truer, comes to closer grips with the forces of life, seeks more ruthlessly to find the roots of motive, the sources of character, the causes of action.
It is a long novel containing close upon two hundred thousand words, and its story could be boiled down into the compass of half a dozen sentences. Nevertheless, with such skill has Miss West painted her characters, marshaled her temperaments, used her emotional elements, that the attention is at once enlisted and the interest grows constantly deeper and more absorbing until the end. Stripped down to its last essentials, it is a story of the love of a man for the girl he intends to marry cutting across his love for his mother. But it would be as inadequate to describe it thus as to say of a tempestuous, thrilling, dramatic conflagration merely that "a fire burned down such and such a block yesterday," for this situation of a man greatly loving his promised wife and yet being deeply absorbed in his lifelong love of his mother not only flowers out into drama in the present, but opens the doors into the past and shows the fateful story being enacted, step by step, that lives on from one generation to the next. It is out of this sense of continuing destiny that the novel takes its title, for "the Judge" is the mother of children, the woman who by her choice of their father determines their fate, visits upon them their destiny….
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