penetrated to the secret city which is in every man's heart: "I love him so that I am blind for him and deaf for him and dead for him. . . . Before it is too late I want it, I want him, I want happiness." Such is the poignant cry of the Russian woman unhappily married, who finds in the stolid Cambridge Rugger Blue" the firmness and solidity and power which every woman worships more than anything else in the world. I could write at length of John Galsworthy's sensitive heart, of Miss G. B. Stern's insight into the problems of the sexes; I should like to extol Ralph Straus's strong, trenchant, healthy point of view, and Joseph Conrad's Romantic realism. Leonard Merrick's sad irony should receive its due share of praise, and Sheila Kaye Smith's masterly pictures of Sussex should not pass unnoticed. . . . I suppose there are not less than fifty writers whose books one eagerly devours year by year. At one moment we are intrigued by the queer artistry of James Joyce; the next, and Gilbert Cannan's clear, hard, polished intellect seems to us the most desirable art in the world. The war is over, and those domestic problems which once seemed very small when compared with the immanence of death and the grandeur of male friendships, now loom as large as ever. One thing only we require of those who write, that they shall be as Tchekov says, "humanists to the very tips of their fingers." They must find life interesting, they must be insatiably curious, they must write of people and things as they see them. They must have a point of view, and they should inspire us with courage and enable us to face our own difficulties. There would appear to be a sharp cleavage between the novels that matter, those which make us think, and attempt to present us with a

B

picture of actualities, and those myriads of others which don't pretend to do more than amuse. There is no question that the world is made the better by those energetic spirits who feel called upon to commit to paper the thoughts that surge through them, the experiences through which they or their imaginations pass. Novel-writing is no easy task and few things make one so speechless with rage as the stupidity of those blind readers who write 66 vulgar rubbish " across a page of Swinnerton, or "the man with the muck-rake" on the title-page of Galsworthy. Writers have to dive deep into the bed of humanity and bring up whatever they find: it is only the exception who returns with the pearl. But it requires courage to dive. The text on the cover of the Quarterly has been made the excuse of every mud-flinger for the last hundred years. It is time we realised that the best kind of criticism is pityingly silent over poverty of thought and diction, and lavish of praise where praise can honestly be given. There is so much that is good that we need never read anything else. It is obvious that we are not by any manner of means unanimous in our definition of what is good, but everybody (except George Moore) finds some reward in reading Shakespeare, so I maintain that 90 per cent. of those who read this book will be rewarded if they read the works of the authors mentioned in it. They are not all easy. It is as hard to concentrate on to Dorothy Richardson as it is on to a piece of Latin or Greek unseen, but the reward is great (sometimes) in proportion to the labour we bestow. It costs but little effort to follow the Baroness Orczy, and the recompense is slender; Conrad and Henry James demand the same mental alertness in their readers as they themselves are possessed of.

II

THE GENIUS OF COMPTON MACKENZIE

I

N Sylvia Scarlett Compton Mackenzie carries on

his Balzac scheme of economical selection by

continuing the histories of men and women whose acquaintance we have already made in earlier books. In attempting, therefore, a general survey of his work one is bound to come to the conclusion that his first book, The Passionate Elopement, was simply a magnificent tour de force, an exquisite "essay in literary bravura," a piece of loveliness thrown off by the artist as a young man while he was feeling his way.

The six novels which followed it all deal with the same little coterie of principals, and there is no reason why the number should not be extended indefinitely. He himself computes it at thirty.

There is no question of our getting tired of them, once we take into account certain definite limitations that are peculiar to Mackenzie's genius. In the first place, he possesses a memory which is almost Macaulayesque. I know of no author who can re-create our earliest years so accurately or so sympathetically unfortunately this leads him into the error of believing implicitly in a gospel he has made his own: "Childhood makes the instrument, youth tunes the strings, and early manhood plays the melody."

"I very much doubt if any impressions after eighteen or nineteen help the artist," says Guy.

"All experience after that age is merely valuable for maturing and putting into proportion the more vital experiences of childhood."

Wordsworthian, but not true. Nevertheless, Mackenzie believes it, and so we have to listen to an interminable noise of hammering at the instrument followed by an extravagantly long tuning-up before the play begins. In spite of the accuracy with which he reveals to us again the golden hours of our infancy, the thick-sighted ambition of our youth, with its quick-changing rhapsodies, and the unhealthy imagination of our adolescence, we get bored. The curtainraiser is too long: the adventure is all prelude.

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His second limitation is even worse! He seems quite unable to create a decent man. Alan can at least play cricket, but none of his other "heroes " has any positive virtue. Maurice is as unstable as Reuben: Jenny's exquisite character crystallises itself into commonness " in his eyes when he attempts to get her into proper perspective by leaving her: Guy is so inert that he allows trifling debts to destroy one of the most perfect idylls in fiction : he is molluscous, jejune, made up of shreds and patches of other men's clichés: "I must be free if I'm going to be an artist," he repeats, parrot-like, to Pauline, understanding not a whit what he means. This is, if you please, the man who was talked of as "the most brilliant man of his time at Oxford."

There are many absurdly impossible incidents in all these novels, but there is nothing quite so farcically surprising as Michael Fane's "First" in History. Much might be forgiven him if he had brains; he has nothing but a maudlin affection for Don Quixote, an unhealthy taste for the more licentious classics and low life, a sentimental attitude to religion, and an

astounding ignorance of life. We are led to believe that Sylvia in the end settles down after her picaresque life with this nincompoop for her husband: if our guess is correct she might just as well have remained with her "thoroughly negative" Philip (also an Oxford man).

It is as if Mackenzie definitely set out to prove that a University turned out all its pupils cut to pattern .. and what a pattern it is! "Shallow, shallow ass that I am," plaintively bleats Maurice with his usual insincere self-depreciation, "incompetent, dull, and unimaginative block." That exactly describes them all. One other trait they have in common which finally places them beyond the pale of our favour. They are, without exception, incorrigible snobs. One could forgive their interminable empty chatter, their futility, even their woodenness; but their appalling self-complacency destroys any possible interest on our part in their welfare. They have money, therefore they are the salt of the earth. I have seen Mackenzie compared with Thackeray, for what reason I cannot fathom. But this gallery of callow undergraduates might well be included in the modern Book of Snobs.

Lastly we come to the limitation of label. It is customary to classify all modern authors. Mackenzie has been hailed as the leader of the "realistic " school. This is no place to enter into a discussion on the connotation of critical labels, but if "realistic " is meant to be synonymous with "actual," Mackenzie is no more a realist than Dickens was. He has the comic spirit much too fully developed (thank God he possesses what none of his heroes has, a sense of humour) to depict life as he sees it. With a gorgeous abandon he gives his nimble wit free play to carica