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Lampe a venomous beast of a woman.' She then becomes maddened with jealousy, gets ill, only recovering on the reappearance of Louis. Ultimately they, of course, fall into each other's arms . but it's Beckwith that we are mainly concerned with in this novel, not the love lyrics. "I've been thinking," says Dorothy, “whether perhaps Beckwith-that it isn't altogether a place at all. I mean, whether it isn't a sort of disease. If you live in London you hardly know your neighbours-you have your own friends. Nobody else cares twopence about you. But London isn't England. I've been wondering if, directly you go to England to live, you don't find Beckwith. Isn't Beckwith any small town in England? Isn't the choice between London-that's heartless-and Beckwith, where your life's everybody's business? Lovely Beckwith-poor-poor people-shut up in their houses and their shops, and never seeing outside I think I hate stupidity worse than anything on earth, because it frightens me and crushes me." In order to press the moral home Mr Swinnerton favours us with an epilogue in the shape of a conversation between Miss Lampe and other typical Beckwithians after Louis and Dorothy had escaped from their toils. "While they were here I felt all the time that they were spoiling our little Cranford." Cranford a community spending its time in a venomous search for the weakness of other people, watching, envying, scratching.

M

V

STEPHEN MCKENNA

R MCKENNA leapt into fame with Sonia: it was no compliment to him. He had already written novels before this which apparently no one read, which were nearly as good as, if not better than, the one over which the public chose to rave. He is a born raconteur: but there is very little depth in him: most of his work scintillates with an obvious harshness: he indulges in epigrams: like Oscar Wilde he does not seem even to realise that there are any classes of society other than the aristocracy: his horizon is bounded by Half-Moon Street on the one side and Clarges Street on the other: he has a gift. of wit which in Ninety-six Hours' Leave, a book that couldn't have taken more than ninety-six hours to write, is thoroughly adapted for readers of The Bystander and undergraduates generally. It is as well that there should be novelists who exactly suit convalescents. The authoress of Elizabeth and Her German Garden is one of the best of these: Stephen McKenna is another. . . . I cannot think him a genius talented? yes. Admirable for reading in a train or when the brain is tired. And this is not to depreciate his value. There are very few really satisfactory novels which can hold our attention and yet not probe into the problems of life. You may say that in Midas and Son he has attacked a very grave problem, that of immense wealth and its dangers, but most of us would be willing to accept all the responsibilities of vast riches quite light-heartedly if any sportsman were to be forthcoming with the offer

of them. The problem of poverty as seen by George Gissing gives genius full scope, but genius regards the problem of Midas as quite a good joke. We thank God for Stephen McKenna because he occupies our very necessary hours of ease. It is so delightful to find that he knows his job. There are scarcely any people in his pages who are not titled: the joy of discovering that they do actually talk as titled people do talk—that is, like every one else above the local grocer is a very real one. Most novelists have a special vocabulary for dukes: they move stiffly in their presence: it is hard even for an Honourable to unbend. I like characters who make it a rule never to see suffering: for whom suffering and poverty do not exist. "When the world is simply crowded with beautiful things to see, to hear, to smell, to touch, to taste, it is nothing but perverted ingenuity to go in search of squalor and pain and hunger: the only suffering I know is that which comes over me when I reflect on the transitory nature of it all, and between ourselves I don't let that distress me as much as an artist in life should." I feel drawn to people who keep engagement books of this sort: April 30th, oysters go out of season; " who make epigrams like “ Man cannot live by Aubrey Beardsley alone, at least not after he's five-and-twenty"; "To speak seriously argues an arrested temperament"; or the more sober statements of men like Lord Darlington, "You can't get a wife without working for her, and you can't work without a wife"; or the Oxford don who used to say that the worst of bachelor parties was that you missed the exquisite moment when the ladies left the room."

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And having written so far I am troubled. I don't want to cross it all out because it is in some measure

true. But it is not the whole truth. Let me test it by taking The Reluctant Lover as an example of his art at its best. There are few more readable books on the market: there is a rattling good plot, unexpected dénouement, human characters, adorable heroines, quite a number of them: Mr McKenna has the deftest touch in limning the features and probing the minds of attractive young girls: his dialogue is always clever, if at times unnaturally artificial and stilted he is a master craftsman in avoiding loose ends and polishing rough edges. In some ways this story of the selfish, but entirely lovable boy, Cyril Fitzroy, is the story of the development of every man: "He affects to study women as he studies men, in the light of specimens and sometimes as works of art by an inspired hand. From a sexual point of view he is completely indifferent and extraordinarily cold-blooded." But he is doomed to fall when the exquisite Myra Woodbridge, piqued by his indifference, sets her cap at him. The description of Lady Delaunay's ball, where the pair first meet and dance together for six hours in succession, is inimitably told: the intellectual sparring between the two is a watered-down Meredith, and therefore more like life as we know it than it is in Meredith. This is not to suggest that Mr. McKenna can compare in any way whatever with this or any other genius: I still maintain that he has no genius: but his talent is unmistakable. I could find it in my heart to wish that he would quote less Latin, and not hark back so frequently to Oxford experiences. He writes like the elderly uncle he pretends to be in Sonia. Even as an undergraduate he must have been very like a don. Still quite a young man, like Cyril Fitzroy, he yet talks academically and in the tones of sophis

ticated, disillusioned middle age. Not for him the follies and extravagances of youth. One reads something of himself in the character of Rodney Trelawney, the young Oxford don prematurely aged and worldweary, knowing little of sympathy, inexperienced in life, a little crabbed, a little inhuman, a little lonely, yet immensely complacent and self-satisfied. He must have his Oxford lunch of dressed crab, quails, green peas, marasquino jelly, croustade au parmeson, strawberries, and iced hock cup; his clothes must fit him perfectly, and there must always be the white silk pyjamas; there must be a persistent dredging of the waters of the memory to recall old Oxford "rags," old Oxford tales discreditable to Balliol, upholding the prestige of The House. . . . But all this, again, is a trifle unkind and only partly true. There is plenty of intellectual stimulus, and very little beating about the bush, no morbid psychology here: on the other hand, there is some very straight talk at times, as in this illuminating passage: "Give a thing for nothing, and it will be valued at nothing: give poor people free education, and they regard it as valueless. If Rodney [it is Myra speaking] gives me the whole-hearted adoration you speak of—and I don't have to struggle for it-I shall count it as valueless, and in course of time it will die of neglect. Which is not a good condition for 'sickness and health, weal and woe,' for life. The remedy is to find some one who attracts me and force him to love me whether he wants to or not. And when I have won his love I shall value it, and when he has had to part with it with a struggle he will see the value I put upon it, and know it is in good hands, and he will honour me for the fight I have fought and the victory I have won." She is thinking, of course, of Cyril, who is