Ethel Sidgwick’s Books
[Small, Maynard and Company, Boston.]
I cannot let another issue of The Little Review go to press without some mention of Ethel Sidgwick. Last year, with a sense of worship, I read Succession, the second volume of a trilogy devoted to the story of a boy-wonder violinist. To find such subtlety, such radiance, such art—to find such music!—in a piece of fiction was an unforgettable experience. Music has never been so richly treated in fiction—except in Jean Christophe, which of course is the master work of the last years. I felt that I had never comprehended any character so fully as I did little Antoine, and I still feel that way. This year on Christmas day, as a sort of special celebration, I read the first volume, Promise. It is just as interesting, though there is not such a brilliant concentration of art in it. But isn’t there some way to make these books known? They will never be popular; but it is tragic to think of their not getting to the people who would value them. Their publishers would far rather advertise their cheap fiction than to try to force Ethel Sidgwick on a nation that does not demand good work of novelists.
Oxford and Genius
Sinister Street, by Compton Mackenzie. [D. Appleton and Company, New York.]
E. Temple Thurston attracted attention here before Compton Mackenzie did, but the latter is as far ahead of him now as is Gilbert Canaan, whose Peter Homunculus came out about the time of Thurston’s City of Beautiful Nonsense. These three young Englishmen know how to write English prose; Mackenzie and Canaan know how to tell big stories. Sinister Street is much too important a book to be reviewed in less than three or four pages at least. The first part of it tells of the modern man at Oxford—“a more complete account of the mind of a young man of our day than has been written previously in English, an account which presents some of the things that Thackeray meant when he complained that his public would not permit him to tell all he wished about Pendennis, and a good many more besides,” as Lucien Cary has said. It is so extremely well done that the second part of the volume—the hero’s reactions to life after Oxford—comes with a sense of forced writing. Perhaps the war had something to do with it. We shall try to review this book more at length later.