Though, broadly speaking, the seven young men are profoundly interested
in themselves, there are four that attach especial importance to the
life which has made them what they are. Messrs Cannan, Walpole,
Beresford, and Lawrence, capable though they be of standing outside
themselves, are, without much doubt, happier when they stand inside. I
do not know in extreme detail where they were born or what they
suffered, but it demands no great sagacity to reconstruct, for instance,
Mr Walpole as a man who went to Cambridge, taught in a school, and later
wrote books; likewise Mr Beresford, as one who struggled up against
poverty and physical infirmity into a place in the sunshine of letters;
Mr Cannan is still more emphatically interested in the reactions of his
own harsh and sensitive temperament, while Mr Lawrence, a little more
puzzling, is very much the lover of life, telling us tales of his
mistress. This is not, perhaps, because they take these facts that lie
nearest to their hand as the argument of their play. Each one of them
has shown by some excursion that he was capable of jerking the earth off
its axis, the axis being, with him as with all of us, his own
personality. Thus Mr Cannan, in _Peter Homunculus_, presents in
Meredithian wise, a picture of the development of a very young man, a
rather romantic though metallically brilliant young man predestined by
nature to have a bad, but very exciting time: that is Mr Cannan. More
clearly still, in _Little Brother_, he takes himself up again, himself
wondering in Cambridge 'what it's all for,' as Mr Wells would say,
wondering still more, and still more vainly, when he enters London's
cultured circles, from which he escapes through an obscure byway of
Leicester Square. And then again, in _Round the Corner_, it is, a very
little, Mr Cannan in Manchester, incredulously examining, and through
Serge commenting upon the world. Were it not for _Devious Ways_ one
would be inclined to think that Mr Cannan had nothing to say except
about himself, and, indeed, it is disquieting to think that the book
which saves him from such a conclusion is inferior to his subjective
work. Still, it is not altogether a bad book; it is not the sort of book
with which Mr Cannan will bid for fame, but it represents the streak of
detachment which is essential if this author is to show himself able to
stand outside his own canvas; moreover, in _Round the Corner_, Mr Cannan
was less limited by himself than he was in his previous books. The
praise that has been showered on this novel was perfervid and
indiscriminate; it was not sufficiently taken into account that the
book was congested, that the selection of details was not unerring, and
that the importation of such a character as Serge laid the author open
to the imputation of having recently read _Sanin_; but, all this being
said, it is certain that _Round the Corner_, with its accurate
characterisation, its atmospheric sense and its diversity, marked a
definite stage in the evolution of Mr Cannan. Though refusing to accept
it as work of the first rank, I agree that it is an evidence of Mr
Cannan's ability to write work of the first rank: he may never write it,
but this book is his qualification for entering the race. His later
novels, _Young Earnest_ and _Mendel_, have done him no good; they are
too closely related to his own life; his private emotions are also too
active in his pacifist skit, _Windmills_, which is inferior to _The Tale
of a Tub_. Other novels, too, such as _Three Pretty Men_ and _The Stucco
House_, exhibit painful superiority over the ordinary person; lacking
humour, it seems that Mr Cannan has taken himself too seriously, one
might almost say, too dramatically; those sufferings, misunderstandings,
isolations, and struggles of his youth have been to him too vivid and
too significant. For a long time his picture fogged his vision; he could
not see himself for himself. But he may come to view more sanely the
epic of his own life and more wholly the epic of the life of others. If
he will consent to be less the actor and more the spectator, he will
probably succeed in becoming the playwright.
Mr Walpole does not, so definitely as Mr Cannan, view the world in terms
of his own life, his personality is otherwise tinged: he is less angry,
less chafed, and it may be that because he is of the softer Southern
breed, he has no share in the dour aggressiveness of Mr Cannan's North
country. And there is a variation in the self that Mr Walpole paints: it
is not what he is, or even what he thinks he is, but what he would like
to be. In his chief work, by which is meant the most artistic, _Mr
Perrin and Mr Traill_, the writer shares with us much of the wistfulness
he must have felt in his early manhood, but Mr Traill is not Mr Walpole;
if he were, he would have recurred in other novels; he is the simple,
delicate, and passionate young man (passionate, that is, in the modest
English way), that Mr Walpole would like to be. This we know because Mr
Walpole loves Traill and sees no weakness in him: now, one may love that
which one despises, but that which one admires one must love. No lover
can criticise his lady, if his lady she is to remain, and thus, in his
incapacity to see aught save charm in his hero, Mr Walpole indicates the
direction of his own desire. Yet, and strangely enough, in _The Prelude
to Adventure_, there is a suggestion that Mr Walpole would gladly be
Dune, haughty and sombre; in _Fortitude_, that he would be Peter
Westcott, have his fine courage, his delicacy and his faith. He asks too
much in wishing to be Proteus, but, in so doing, he puts forward a claim
to talent, for he tells us his aspiration rather than his realisation.
Indeed, if it were not that _The Prelude to Adventure_ is so very much
his life in Cambridge, _Mr Perrin and Mr Traill_ his career in a little
school, _Fortitude_ his life under the influence of London's
personality, he would not come into the class of those men who make copy
of their past. And it is a feature of high redeeming value that in
_Maradick at Forty_, he should have attempted to make copy of his
future, for, again, here is aspiration. Mr Walpole needs to increase his
detachment and widen the fields which he surveys. Schools and Cambridge:
these are tales of little boys and their keepers; literary London: that
is the grasshopper and its summer singing. He needs to develop, to
embrace business and politics, the commonness of love, and the vital
roughness of the world. He has tried to do this in _The Dark Forest_,
but this is so close a _pastiche_ of Russian novels that it cannot stand
for Mr Walpole's emancipation.