IV

In Mr Beresford we discover a closer identity between the man and the

mask, though he has written several books where he does not figure, _The

Hampdenshire Wonder_, the tale of an incredible child, _The House in

Demetrius Road_, and _Goslings_, a fantastic commentary upon life. Mr

Beresford is more at his ease when he tells his own tale. In three

books, _The Early History of Jacob Stahl_, _A Candidate for Truth_, and

_The Invisible Event_, Mr Beresford has exploited himself with some

eloquence; he has the sense of selection, he is not crabbed, and he

informs with fine passion those early years through which fleets a fine

woman figure. In these books, as also in _Housemates_, Mr Beresford

shows that he knows love, and isolation, and pain: those other young men

with whom we are concerned feel these things, too, but hardly one so

passionately. Mr Beresford's merit is that he is more ordinary, thus

that he is less unreal than the passionate persons his rivals are or

would be. Yet, if this were all, it might not be enough, for a tale may

be told twice but not more often; if, in the first part of _Goslings_,

Mr Beresford had not shown how closely and incisively he can picture the

lower-middle class, analyse its ambitions, sympathise with its hopes,

his would be a limited scope. I hope he will go further in this

direction, extend his criticism of life through more of those people and

more of their fates, while he himself remains outside. He must choose:

Jacob Stahl, that is Mr Beresford, is a charming creature whom one would

gladly know; but Jasper Thrale, expounding the world, is not Mr

Beresford, for he is a prig. Mr Beresford may run on two lines: one for

himself alone, and one for the world as he sees it.

Mr D. H. Lawrence's is not in the same class. Once only can he have been

autobiographical; either in _The White Peacock_, or in _Sons and

Lovers_, for he could evidently not have been, at the same time, the

poetic son of a collier and a cultured member of the well-to-do classes

in a farming community. Probably it is an open secret that Mr Lawrence

is closer to the Nottingham collier than to the rustic who made hay

while others played Bach. But it does not matter very much whether he be

one or the other; it is not his physical self he puts into his books,

but the adventures of his temperament. It is a curious temperament, a

mixture of Northern brutality with wistful Northern melancholy. His

characters, and this applies to George and Lettice in _The White

Peacock_, to Sigmund, in _The Trespasser_, to Paul Morel, Mrs Morel, and

Miriam, in _Sons and Lovers_, are always battling with adversity for the

sake of their fine hopes, are held up by their pride, and divorced a

little from commoner folk by the taste that takes them to Verlaine and

Lulli. If it is Mr Lawrence to whom every flower of the hedge and every

feather of the strutting cock cries colour and passionate life, if it is

for him that the water-meadows are fragrant and the star-lit nights

endless deep, it is not for him that the characters live, but for us: he

takes his share, he leaves us ours; he inflames his characters, then

allows them to act. Indeed, if no fault were to be found with him on

mere literary score, Mr Lawrence would be more than a man of promise: he

would have arrived. But his passion carries him away; he sees too much,

shows too much, he analyses too fully, discovers too many elements. It

may be urged that no artist can see or analyse too fully. But he can, if

he discovers that which is not there. Mr Lawrence, having found gold in

the dross of common men and women, is inclined to infer that there is

too much gold in the vulgar. Being convinced of this, he becomes hectic;

his people are as flames, feeding upon mortal bodies and burning them

up. His peril is excessive sensation. He needs some better knowledge of

affairs, more intercourse with the cruder rich, with the drab

middle-class, so that his brilliant vision may by its dulling become

tolerable to meaner eyes. He needs to discover those for whom music hath

no charms, and yet are not base in attitude.

Mr Lawrence, who exploits his life not over much, affords us a necessary

transition between those who are interested in little else and the

second group, Mr Mackenzie, Mr Onions, and Mr Swinnerton, who have, with

more or less success, tried to stand back as they write. Of these, Mr

Compton Mackenzie is the most interesting because, in three volumes, he

has made three new departures: _The Passionate Elopement_, a tale of

powder and patches; _Carnival_, a romance of the meaner parts of London

and of Charing Cross Road, and lastly _Sinister Street_, where he links

up with those who exploit only their experiences. Evidently Mr Mackenzie

believes that a good terrier never shakes a rat twice. Had _Sinister

Street_ been his first contribution to literature, Mr Mackenzie would

have found his place indicated in the first group, but as he began by

standing outside himself it must be assumed that he thought it a pity to

let so much good copy go begging. He is a man difficult of assessment

because of his diversity. He has many graces of style, and a capacity

which may be dangerous of infusing charm into that which has no charm.

He almost makes us forget that the heroine of _Carnival_ is a vulgar

little Cockney, by tempting us to believe that it might have been

otherwise with her. There is a cheapness of sentiment about this Jenny,

this Islington columbine, but we must not reproach Mr Mackenzie for

loving his heroine over-much: too many of his rivals are not loving

theirs enough. Indeed, his chief merit is that he finds the beautiful

and the lovable more readily than the hideous. His figures can serve as

reagents against the ugly heroine and the scamp hero who grew

fashionable twenty years ago. His success, if it comes at all, will be

due to his executive rather than to his artistic quality, for he often

fails to sift his details. In _Sinister Street_, we endure a great

congestion of word and interminable catalogues of facts and things. If

he has a temperament at all, which I believe, it is stifled by the

mantle in which he clothes it. It is not that Mr Mackenzie knows too

much about his characters, for that is not possible, but he tells us too

much. He does not give our imagination a chance to work. His romantic

earnestness, as shown in _Guy and Pauline_, is unrelieved by humour and

makes those details wearisome. Yet, his hat is in the ring. If he can

prune his efflorescent periods and select among his details he may, by

force of charm, attain much further than his fellows. He will have to

include just those things and no others which can give us an illusion of

the world.

V

In direct opposition to Mr Mackenzie, we find Mr Onions. While Mr

Mackenzie gives us too much and allows us to give nothing, Mr Onions

gives us hardly anything and expects us to write his novel for him as we

read it. There are two strands in his work, one of them fantastic and

critical, the other creative. Of the first class are the tales of

_Widdershins_, and _The Two Kisses_, a skit on studios and

boarding-houses. Even slightly more massive works, such as the love epic

of advertisement, _Good Boy Seldom_, and the fierce revelation of

disappointment which is in _Little Devil Doubt_ do not quite come into

the second class; they are not the stones on which Mr Onions is to

build. They are a destructive criticism of modern life, and criticism,

unless it is creative, is a thing of the day, however brilliant it may

seem. Mr Oliver Onions can be judged only on his trilogy, _In Accordance

with the Evidence_, _The Debit Account_, and _The Story of Louie_, for

these are creative works, threaded and connected; they are an attempt

and, on the whole, a very successful one, to take a section of life and

to view it from different angles. If the attempt has not completely

succeeded, it is perhaps because it was too much. It rests upon close

characterisation, a sense of the iron logic of facts and upon

atmospheric quality. There is not a young man, and for the matter of

that an old one, more than Mr Onions, capable of anatomical psychology.

There may be autobiography in some of Mr Onions's work, but there is in

his trilogy no more than should colour any man's book.

Yet Mr Onions has his devil, and it takes the form of a rage against the

world, of a hatred that seems to shed a bilious light over his puppets.

His strong men are hard, almost brutal, inconsiderate, dominant only by

dint of intellect, and arrogant in their dominance; his weak men are

craven, lying, incapable of sweetness; even strong Louie is so haughty

as almost to be rude. All this appears in the very style, so much so

that, were it not for the cliche, I would quote Buffon. The sentences

are tortured as if born in agony; the highly selected detail is

reluctant, avaricious, as if Mr Onions hated giving the world anything.

And yet, all this culminates in an impression of power: Mr Onions is the

reticent man whose confidence, when earned, is priceless. He lays no

pearls before us; he holds them in his half-extended hand for us to take

if we can. Some tenderness; some belief that men can be gentle and women

sweet; a little more hope and some pity, and Mr Onions will be judged

more fairly.

Of Mr Swinnerton, who also stands outside his canvas, one is not so

sure. He made, in _The Casement_, an elusive picture of the life of the

well-to-do when confronted with the realities of life, but did not

succeed emphatically enough in the more ponderous effort entitled _The

Happy Family_. There he was too uniform, too mechanical, and rather too

much bound by literary traditions. He was so bound also in his brilliant

_Nocturne_, the tragedy of five creatures within a single night. But Mr

Swinnerton has a point of view, an attitude toward life; I could not

define it, but am conscious of its existence, and in a man of promise

that is quite enough. For a man with an individual attitude will make it

felt if he has the weapons of style with which to express it. Now Mr

Swinnerton shows great dexterity in the use of words, felicity of

phrase, a discrimination in the choice of details which will enable him

to embody such ideas as he may later on conceive. He has only to fear

that he may be mistaken as to the size of his ideas; like Mr Hugh de

Selincourt, he may be too much inclined to take as the plot of a novel

an idea and a story in themselves too slender. Under modern publishing

conditions he may be compelled to spin out his work: as his tendency is

to concentrate, he may find himself so much hampered as to lose the

chief charm of his writing, viz., balance. He has shown charm in

_Nocturne_, some power in _The Happy Family_; these two qualities need

blending, so that Mr Swinnerton be no longer two men, but one.

Brief mention must be made of Mr Perceval Gibbon. Of his novels, one

only, _Souls in Bondage_, showed remarkable promise, but his later work

with the exception of a few short stories, was disappointing. In that

book there was colour, atmosphere, characterisation and technique, but

there was also passion. The passion was not maintained in later years.

Other qualities were still there: he knows how to express the dusty

glare or the dank warmth of the tropics, the languor, veiling fire, of

its men and women, but the vision is a little exterior. Mr Gibbon needs

to state his point of view, if he has one, to let us see more clearly

how he himself stands in relation to the world. This does not apply to

Mr de Selincourt, somewhat afflicted with moral superciliousness, whose

point of view is one of aloof vigour. To a great charm of style he adds

selectiveness; in _A Daughter of the Morning_, the characterisation is

inwrought, just as in _A Boy's Marriage_ it is passionate. And again

there is Mr C. E. Montague, all bathed in the glamour of George

Meredith and Mr Henry James. Of these Mr de Selincourt is by far the

most interesting; he has elected to depict not the people who live ill,

but those whom he conceives as living well, proud of their body,

responsible to their instincts. In _A Soldier of Life_, notably, he

makes almost credible the regeneration of the 'ordinary' man. Still,

they are difficult to classify, these three; to reject their candidature

may be too much, so fine are their qualities; and yet, to inscribe them

upon the roll may be undue, for they have not the raw massiveness, the

air that one wants to find in boys, about to be men; they are too

particular, too much inclined to look away from the world and to

concentrate on some microscopic section. To enlarge without loosening is

no easy matter.

Lastly, and by himself, there is Mr E. M. Forster, who has been

forgotten a little in a hurry, because he has not, since 1910, felt

inclined to publish a novel; he is still one of the young men, while it

is not at all certain that he is not 'the' young man. Autobiography has

had its way with him, a little in _A Room With a View_, and very much

more in that tale of schoolmasters, _The Longest Journey_; but it was

_Howard's End_, that much criticised work, which achieved the

distinction of being popular, though of high merit. This marks out Mr

Forster and makes it likely that he can climb Parnassus if he chooses.

In _Howard's End_ Mr Forster surveyed the world in particular and also

in general; he was together local and cosmic; he was conscious of the

little agitations and artificialities of the cultured, of the upthrust

of the untaught and of the complacent strength of those who rule. Over

all, hung his own self as the wings of a roc darkening the countryside.

It is because Mr Forster has seized a portion of the world and welded it

with himself that the essence of him may persist and animate other

worlds. His attitude is one of tolerance; he prays that we may not drift

too far from the pride of body which is the pride of spirit. Mystic

athleticism: that seems to be Mr Forster's message; as it is essential

that the man of to-morrow should be a man of ideas as well as a man of

perceptions, it is quite certain that, if Mr Forster chooses to return

to the field, he will establish his claim.

One word as to women. The time has gone when we discriminated between

the work of women and of men; to-day, 'Lucas Malet,' Miss May Sinclair,

Mrs Sedgwick, Mrs Edith Wharton, Miss Violet Hunt, Miss Ethel Sidgwick,

Mrs Belloc-Lowndes, and Mrs Dudeney, must take their chance in the rough

and tumble of literary criticism, and the writer does not suggest a

comparison between them and the leading men. For this there is a very

good reason: the young women of to-day are promising work of an entirely

new kind. They have less style than their precursors and more ideas:

such women writers as Miss Amber Reeves,[3] Miss Viola Meynell, Miss

Sheila Kaye-Smith,[4] Miss Tennyson Jesse, Miss Dorothy Richardson, Miss

Katherine Gerould, Miss Bridget MacLagan have produced so far, very

little; they can be indicated as candidates, but much more faintly than

their masculine rivals. They write less, and less easily; they are

younger at their trade, more erratic. It is enough to mention them, and

to say that, so far as women are showing indications of approximating to

men in literary quality, these are the women who are likely soon to

bear the standards of their sex.

[Footnote 3: See Special Chapter.]

[Footnote 4: _Ibid._]

To sum up, I suggest that the rough classification of the seven young

men must not be taken as fixed. Some are more autobiographic than

evocative; some are receptive rather than personally active, and yet

others have not chosen between the two roads. Yet, taking them as a

whole, with the reservation of possible dark horses, these are probably

the men among whom will be found the two or three who will 'somehow,' in

another ten years, lead English letters. It will be an indefinable

'somehow,' a compound of intellectual dominance and emotional sway. We

shall not have a Bennett for a Bennett, nor a Wells for a Wells, but

equivalents of power, and equivalents of significance, who will be

intimately in tune with their time and better than any will express it.