at Sylvia Scarlett becoming a temporary prostitute after leaving Philip.

It is partly because they are so virginal in character, partly because they so hate men to make love to them, that (when the flame is kindled) these heroines descend a little lower than conventional angels on being scorned. Mackenzie is never happier than when he is transcribing the dialogues of his women: one can hear their very accents (if we are not snobs they do not grate on our polished ears), and we fall desperately in love not with their physical beauty so much as with their wonderful vivacity, never-failing spirits, and extraordinary bonhomie.

66

The tang of bitterness on Sylvia's tongue adds to her charms. These are the lips we wish to hear at carnival-time (when we drop the mask of our respectability) whispering " Viens donc . . . je t'aime." We need no second invitation. From the crowd of Pierrots we draw our lily-white Columbine, and cease from banging other roysterers on the head with bladders : we set out on an amazingly incredible crusade, and mix with the wives of lavatory-attendants, decadent artists, maniacs who think that they are inside out, Treacherites, priests, murderers, harlots, pseudoEmperors of Byzantium, chorus-girls, and procurators we are whirled from the Fulham Road through Granada, Morocco, Brussels, the United States, to Buenos Ayres; from the sylvan quiet of Plashers' Mead to the ugly filthiness of Leppard Street: we meet a fresh romance at every turn in the road. If we tire of one set of companions we can shake them off by taking the first 'bus that passes.

We are swept along so fast that we no longer feel any astonishment at meeting Maurice in the heart of Africa, Arthur Madden in a third-rate hotel in Sulphur

ville, U.S.A., or think it strange that Sylvia, Lily, and Michael should find one another again at a skating-rink dance.

Her mother would go mad on the very day that Jenny gave herself to Danby: the young wife of seventeen in such a world may well know her Petronius and Apuleius, and give her judgment on Aristophanes. The secret is that these are not real people: Mackenzie's is not the world as we know it. Everything is possible on the cinema, and Sylvia Scarlett is the finest film I have ever seen. We go to the pictures to get away from realities, to indulge our senses in a riotous phantasmagoria. "Let the young enjoy theirselves," is the ever-recurring cry of the old in all these books.

"If you could break loose yourself sometimes," cries Sylvia in desperation to her pedantic husband, you'd be much easier to live with."

66

The syrens call; like Fra Lippo Lippi we begin to tear our sheets into ropes to let ourselves down from our prison. . . . We, too, want to join the laughing nymphs who sing to the guitar beneath our window. Transported for the moment into golden asses, we try our hand at the game only to be rebuffed sadly in our search for the real Sylvia-we meet no daughters of joy, but filles de joie, no "lazy, laughing, languid Jenny," but only some desperately dull drab whose sole resemblance to our dream-heroine is that she

66

actually calls us soppy date" and bids us "chinga-ling "if our purse is too attenuated to glut her desires.

No-the wise man will be content to take Compton Mackenzie at his own valuation.

Exquisite figments of our imagination, Sylvia, Pauline, and Jenny, dream-heroines all, we love you

far, far better than Michael, Guy, and Maurice ever could but we are no Pygmalions-we prefer such Galateas in the marble. You can never come to life however hard we pray-and we are realists enough in our soberer moments to breathe quite candidly, "Who cares? "

Compton Mackenzie is our vicarious adventurer, our vicarious gallant: we owe him much for our vicarious escapades: they leave no nasty taste in the mouth.

W

III

NORMAN DOUGLAS

HEN I last dared to give voice to my personal tastes in modern fiction, I was taken to task by many correspondents for having omitted to mention the favourites of others. In many cases they certainly coincided with mine: my excuse for not having publicly proclaimed my affection for these was simply due to lack of space. There are so many novelists writing to-day whose works I infinitely prefer either to those of Thackeray or Dickens that it would be impossible in the length of one essay to maintain my separate reasons for them all. I tried last time to show what my favourite authors had in common: this time I propose rather to let each one manifest his good qualities individually, no longer as members of a school, but as a fresh delineator of life, relying on no precedent, following in the footsteps of no greater contemporary. First among these is Mr Norman Douglas, who in South Wind has produced a book totally unlike any other that I have ever read, inimitably humorous, packed full of philosophy, rich with irony, and interesting throughout. That it completely mystified the critic of The Daily Mail, who self-complacently asserted that he could not understand what it was all about, may be in itself a recommendation. After all, what is it all about? An island, called Nepenthe, famous for its lobsters, girls, and sirocco, which last plays quaint tricks on the temperaments of all who visit

it or live there, is the setting. The characters are all eccentric in so far as they do not conform to the common standards of life.

The book opens with a description of the landing thereon of a sea-sick colonial bishop and a philandering priest. We are then invited to follow a delicious biography of the local patron saint, Dodekanus, so called, perhaps, because he met his death by being sawn asunder into twelve separate pieces while bound between two flat boards of palmwood: another current legend has it that he owed his name to a missive containing the two words Do dekanus; give us a deacon. The grammar is faulty because of the natives' rudimentary knowledge of Latin: they had only learnt the first person singular and the nominative case. A certain Mr Ernest Eames was at that time making it his life-mission to bring up to date a full history of the island and its legends. Of him we learn that "it was not true to say that he fled from England to Nepenthe because he forged his mother's will, because he was arrested while picking the pockets of a lady at Tottenham Court Road Station, because he refused to pay for the upkeep of his seven illegitimate children, because he was involved in a flamboyant scandal of unmentionable nature and unprecedented dimensions, because he was detected while trying to poison the rhinoceros at the Zoo with an arsenical bun, because he strangled his mistress, because he addressed an almost disrespectful letter to the Primate of England, beginning 'My good Owl' for any such like reason; and that he now remained on the island only because nobody was fool enough to lend him ten pounds requisite for a ticket back again."

I can picture the face of The Daily Mail critic,