cate would not all, at a given signal, have gone off their heads in exactly the same way. They must have some warrant in fact. If the prototypes of Jacob Stahl and of Dick Lynneker, of Rachel Beaminster and of the heroine of Gray Youth exist, these books are, in a sense, a portent. The Five Towns might be responsible for Hilda Lessways, but the Five Towns are not responsible for the girl in Gray Youth. One does not feel that the syndicate gives one more than circumstantial evidence, but of that, there is an almost overwhelming amount. This is depressing. Perhaps, eventually, Mr. Compton Mackenzie will resign from the syndicate and really tell us something. At present he too is bound by their conventions. But in Plashers Mead, tiresome as it is with the reiterant egotism of half-fledged youth, he does "get it across." Certain people whose opinion is worth much more than mine, tell me that Mr. Walpole has got it across in The Dark Forest. I must admit, in my own case, the strict limitations of western Europe: it will take more than Mr. Walpole to make Russians credible to me. He seems to me no more plausible than Dostoievsky, and far, far short of Turgenev. And, after all, I am not sure that Nijinsky is not a better expositor than either.

It has been much more difficult than I dreamed, to deal with these gentlemen at all.

The work of one shifts and plays into the work of the other so maddeningly that it is hard, not only to treat of them individually, but to treat of them even as a group. You think you have a line on Mr. Walpole, and you find him melting into Mr. Beresford or Mr. Onions. Everyone knows what a miserable business a composite photograph is. No feature is really defined. These authors differentiate themselves just enough by detail of plot and setting and diction, to avoid a grand inclusive charge of plagiarism. You cannot say that one has filched a page from another, because there is no telling who began it. But I believe that, as far as style is concerned, if you inserted six consecutive pages written severally by the six of them, in any chapter of any book, no one would ever know the difference. Of course, you would have to allow for different names of characters, and some havoc might be played with continuity of plot-if there happened to be any plot in that chapter. But the style would, I am sure, stand the test. Mr. Mackenzie forces his vocabulary as the others do not (he prides himself, I fancy, particularly on the number of his metaphors for the moon); but apart from Mr. Mackenzie's occasional exoticism, they write alike. They have the same rhythms, the same sentence-structure, the same syntactical habits. It is clever, nervous writing, but it is not the

grand style. They are not memorable: they do not stand out, any one of them, or any one of their works, as a mental experience. The only adventure to be got from them is to read them all, and then, forgetting (as you inevitably do) who is who and which is which, analyze the effect of the group. It is a hazy and perplexing effect-as I fear I have too meticulously said.

For in the long run, one's main feeling about the younger English writers is one of sheer disappointment. They have their reputation: people are always telling you that this one or that one is really important. I cannot believe that they are. As portrayers of life, they do not convince a matter partly of muddle-headedness and partly of technique in the narrower sense. Moreover, they are dull. Mr. Bennett may not convince in the end, because in the end one becomes aware of his moral myopia; but he is not usually dull. He writes better than they do that is what it comes to. If there were only one of them, we might put up with him; but how can we put up with six of him? There is not time. As for their attack on convention, whatever it may be, they will have to do it better to get any serious attention paid to them. You need seasoned troops to attack that fortress or at least bigger guns. The only person who thinks that anything, no matter what, is better than

the status quo, is the anarchist. Most of us are not anarchists; and while most of us are willing to have things improved, if necessary, at our own expense, we want some assurance that they will be improved. And if we must make blind experiments-as the reformers all want us to let us at least know the object of the experiment. These writers do not seem to know what they would like to achieve if they could.

What they chiefly breed in one is hopelessness. If this is the best that England can do for us in the way of fiction, we must either encourage our native product, or eschew fiction and take to "serious" reading. These men are too dull. The time is ripe, once more, I believe, for a few big picaresque novels: something in the mode of the Satyricon, and Gil Blas, and Huckleberry Finn. For I do not think that people will put up forever with being bored-especially as they are not boring us in the interests of virtue.

To be sure-though it is some time since I began this essay-I have still not read D. H. Lawrence.

THE REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS

OF RUDYARD KIPLING

T looks Chestertonian as I write it. As if a

I

world of concrete things were to be gath

ered into the titular abstraction; or as if Kipling's rightness were presently to be proved remarkable in that it is all wrong.

And yet, I think, Chesterton or no Chesterton-where is he, by the way?-I mean precisely what I have set down: Rudyard Kipling's remarkable rightness. Right, because time has sustained him against scoffers; remarkable, because no one originally expected that particular kind of rightness from him.

This is not to be a discursive or an exhaustive discussion of Kipling's utterances on planetary or even racial questions. I have not annotated his complete works with his "rightness" in mind. Indeed, to treat him exhaustively would be a very difficult task; for the sum of his wisdom is made up, not of a few big "works," but of an infinite number of significant brevities. My only excuse for dealing with him at all is that I have lived a long time with the prose and verse of Kipling, and that my knowledge of him has reached what Henry James called the point of saturation. I