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INTRODUCTORY

HAVE lately read a book by W. L. George (who

appears to write with equal facility about

everything) on the Modern Novel. I remember to have been astounded at his selection of authors: now that I, in my turn, find that I want to say something about the novel I can already hear the critic saying, "What an amazing selection." It is quite impossible to make a class list. It is like the competition of finding out which is the best of Keats' five Odes, or Shakespeare's greatest tragedy. I have no favourite author. The last time I dared to write generally of the modern author I was taken to task for omitting to mention Charles Marriott. It never struck my critic on that occasion, I suppose, that there are writers who dare not talk about some things because the temptation to fill volume after volume would be so strong. There are moods when Marriott's are the only novels I can rely on to restore me to mental health: I know no man who can make the other sex live as he makes it live: do you remember the passage in Mrs Alemere's Elopement where Dick meets Evelyn again, loving her body, she loving him not at all: "She must despise him for his self-restraint when she was under his protection"? It is a terribly merciless rending of the veil. I love Marriott for his epigrammatic style, his vivid grasp of essentials both in scenic descriptions and in analysis of character: I love him for his "all-round

ness."

He is as much at home with successful business men, scientists, architects, engineers, and miners as he is with artists and philosophers. I love him for his cleanness, his mental sanity, his gospel of " To take by leaving, to hold by letting go." It is certainly a mote, a blemish that he should so persistently dwell on drunkenness in women, and the necessity for divorce in the life of every man, but I like a man who can courageously rush into the market-place with a gospel of this sort: "There is a free love which is neither the ludicrous complication of marriage generally understood by the term, nor a foolish denial or cowardly evasion of sex." I love him for his sense of beauty and goodness, his gentleness and kindly humour . . . but I daren't pick him out as a subject for a special article. It would occupy too much space. I have instead made a quite arbitrary selection: I could have lamented at great length on the disappearance of the Arnold Bennett who gave us The Old Wives' Tale, and the appearance of the expert journalist who gave us The Pretty Lady and The Roll-Call, both of which exhibit great talent, but no genius whatever. I could have pined (for pages) for the Wells of Mr Polly, Kipps, and Love and Mr Lewisham, and become angry that so great a humorist should have devoted to the Deity, politics, sex, and education, what should have been devoted to scientific prophecy and the comedy of the draper's assistant : I could have used up my vocabulary of eulogies on the trilogies of J. D. Beresford and Oliver Onions, and wondered sorrowfully why the former should have condescended to God's Counterpoint, and the latter to write reconstruction novels like The New Moon.

I very nearly decided to give Alec Waugh an article to himself, but I am almost alone in not con

sidering The Loom of Youth a book of surpassing genius. The Prisoners of Mainz is ever so much better; the former was all stale news to me as I am a schoolmaster: it shows great powers of observation, but I get quickly tired of descriptions of games and caricatures of masters. Arnold Lunn and St John Lucas are much more artistic in their pictures of school life: they are so much less heavy. But it would be hard to exaggerate the importance of Alec Waugh: he has made education almost as popular a subject as spiritualism, which is all to the good. and by writing it he cleared the way for himself. He now has acquired humour, lightness, geniality, and self-confidence.

I could have written much on the childlike naïveté of Irene McLeod: Graduation is one of the few novels of the present time which exalts love in its simplest, most honourable sense. Miss M. Fulton, too, is a new writer who achieved in Blight such a success that I would willingly call attention to its merits at greater length. Then there are Middleton Murry with his very modern minute psychological study of moods and thoughts in Still Life, and Hugh Walpole, the eclectic, who lives entirely in and for his art. I suppose if I were really compelled to place my candidates in order of merit I should hesitate for a long time before deposing Hugh Walpole from the premier position, partly because he is interested in the things that interest me more than any others. In Mr Perrin and Mr Traill he started a fashion whereby it was no longer considered impossible to include schoolmasters in a novel. In The Dark Forest and The Secret City he made me even more anxious to know something of that fascinating enigma, Russia, than I had been, after labouring for years among its native writers. The Secret City is, after Forti

tude, the modern novel I would select for my desert island. Walpole's pictures of Russian cities, of Russian home-life, of the revolutions, are masterpieces and remain as concrete images in the mind long after the book is read. And . . . who can depict so well the problems that after all matter so much more to us than anything else in the world . . . our relations with our fellows? "It's no use trying to keep out of things. As soon as they want to put you in-you're in. The moment you're born, you're done for." He realises the price at which a man achieves freedom: how one delivers one's soul over to another human being and is thenceforward lost. "Love's always selfish, always cruel to others, always means trouble, sorrow, and disappointment. But it's worth it, even when it brings complete disaster. Life isn't life without it." Nothing worth having can be achieved without paying enormously. . . and I love Hugh Walpole because he can both face the fact and reckon the cost, and yet count love as worth the horrors it brings. He sees life simply as a trainingground for the immortal soul. The secret of the mystery of life is the isolation that separates every man from his fellow-the secret of dissatisfaction, too; and the only purpose in life is to realise that isolation, and to love one's fellow-man because of it, and to show one's own courage, like a flag to which other travellers may wave their answer life is a tragedy to every Russian simply because the daily round is forgotten by him in his pursuit of an ultimate meaning. We in the West have learnt to despise ultimate meanings as unpractical and rather priggish things." Hugh Walpole realises, as few other writers realise how the power of passion sweeps away all obstacles in its frenzy to achieve its object : he has

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