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BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD.

WAS reading a novel, the other day; had

got about half way through it. The novel

in question was by one of the younger English authors. It was very odd, I thought to myself as I perused it, that I should not (for I read a great deal of fiction) have read before anything by Mr. D. H. Lawrence. I had always meant to, but his work had, for some reason or other, not come my way. And I was glad I was reading it. I ought to have done D. H. Lawrence before. Some people had told me he was "different." He was not so different as all that; still, there was something fresh about him. Perhaps one could differentiate within that group, though I had long since despaired of doing so. I would certainly get something else of D. H. Lawrence's. At that point I decided to go to bed, and shut the book up smartly. The cover revealed to me that the author was J. D. Beresford. Why I had ever thought it was D. H. Lawrence, I do not know. Some false association of ideas at the moment of borrowing it, probably.

The joke is on me, as the younger generation would say. And yet, there is something to be said on my side. The fact is that I had not

expected D. H. Lawrence to be one whit different from Hugh Walpole, J. D. Beresford, Compton Mackenzie, Gilbert Cannan, Oliver Onions, and W. L. George. I found, I thought, a little difference: not much, but enough to give one hope. To be sure, the hope would have ebbed, in any case, before the book was finished. My only gain was the knowledge that Mr. Beresford can do something besides Jacob Stahl. I have yet to experience D. H. Lawrence. Still, I submit that when, to distinguish between one author and another, you are satisfied with so tiny a difference in style as appears between two works by the same man, it means that differences in style within that particular group are not very startling. One would never have read half of Tess and taken it for the work of Henry James; or half of Nostromo and taken that for the work of Meredith. One would have been brought up standing at the first page. It may be, as I say, that D. H. Lawrence is going to be to me, some day, a revelation of individuality. But the reviews do not give one much hope of that.

Now, there are three authors in England who stand a little away from this larger group, though they are not precisely contemporaries of Hardy or of Conrad. Wells and Bennett and Galsworthy have some individuality of style. A chapter of Mr. Wells is "different." A chapter of Arnold Bennett or of Mr. Galsworthy is dif

ferent. Or let me put it in this way. You would not get through half of any one of Mr. Wells's later novels without a deal of pseudo-philosophical reflection on the scheme of things. You would not read so far in any book by Mr. Arnold Bennett without meeting and recognizing his peculiar kind of humor: semi-grin, semifarcical. And I am sure that you would not get through many chapters of a typical Galsworthy novel without hearing a bird calling to its mate

-not if there were a human love affair going on. I do not think you could comfortably sit down with any one of them for half an evening and think that you were reading D. H. Lawrence. You would know whom you were reading.

These three gentlemen have, of course, been writing longer than the aforesaid younger group. They are, one might say, the elder brothers of the brood. If any one of them has served as model to the younger fry, it is Mr. Wells. None of the younger fry has ever approached the technical excellence of Kipps; but, on the other hand, almost any one of them could have written Ann Veronica. Mr. Wells has certainly led them all astray in his time. But there is another equally important thing to be said: Mr. Wells has gone on. In his later phases, he stands quite apart from them all. The Research Magnificent and Mr. Britling Sees It Through are perfectly individual: they

are not, and never could have been, the product of a syndicate. Time was when Wells and Bennett seemed to be drawing near each other. Tono-Bungay is Bennett-ish in spots; and Bealby is, superficially, almost straight Bennett. But Mr. Wells, for weal or woe, has always been interested in the social scheme. The most important thing in Tono-Bungay is Bladesover and Bladesover's moral effect; and even in the ridiculous Bealby there is more than an echo of Bladesover. Mr. Wells is interested in moral values. Sometimes he has had very queer notions about them; but his reward for having been perpetually preoccupied with them is to have won through to The Research Magnificent and Mr. Britling. You may not agree with the hero of either book; but at least he is a person for whom you have respect. His is a dignified moral reaction, even if it is not the moral reaction you would have preferred. He is a serious person, envisaging his relations to the world in a serious temper.

One does not see Mr. Bennett's characters thus envisaging the world; not, at all events, since The Old Wives' Tale. And even in The Old Wives' Tale you feel rather the deterministic net in which the characters are caught, than any personal decisions of their own. The moral of the book is that heredity is more powerful than environment, if these

two come to grips. In the later books, when they are not, like Denry the Audacious and Buried Alive, delicious bits of fooling, you get men and women of a monstrous egotism, of whom it cannot be discerned that either heredity or environment explicitly controls them against their will. An acute critic, who has incidentally had his own say about Wells and Bennett, told me the other day that he thought Bennett's people had "character." I should have said rather that they were "characters," in the colloquial sense. They have selfassertiveness; like Aunty Hamps, they may subjugate their world. But "character"? No: that is a finer, more complicated possession. They want things, sometimes good things and sometimes bad; but they are (especially the women) blond beasts as to their methods. If there is, on the whole, a less decent creature in modern fiction than Hilda Lessways, or a more idiotic one than Audrey Moze, I have still to encounter her. They invoke their gods

By the hunger of change and emotion,
By the thirst of unbearable things.

Ann Veronica, as I once tried to point out, is not true to life: she is a nice girl who proceeds to have reactions that a nice girl does not have without a lot of intervening history. Hilda is never a nice girl; she is a monster from the start and to the finish. As for Audrey-pace