Rock Ferry, in Cheshire, was Miss Sinclair’s birthplace, but when fame discovered her she had been living some years at Hampstead, in London, and “The Divine Fire” moves among London literary circles, sketches cleverly various literary types of character and life in boarding-houses round about Bloomsbury, with for central figure a young Cockney poet, a kind of new Keats, who worked as a shop-assistant, wrote exquisite verse, had all the instincts of a gentleman, but was afflicted with a deplorable habit of dropping his aitches. So much is made of this weakness (which was really only as superficially significant as was Stevenson’s inability to spell certain words correctly) that the frequent insistence on it comes by degrees to seem a little finicking, a little irritating. I do not share Dr. Phelp’s fancy that Charlotte Bronte returned to earth to write “The Divine Fire.” Miss Sinclair may have learned things from Charlotte Bronte; she has written ably and searchingly of her in “The Three Brontes”; but influence from that source—even from the Charlotte of “Shirley” days—is scarcely traceable in any of her books and certainly does not, in “The Divine Fire,” dominate her own quietly distinctive personality.
Few authors owe their popularity to their best work, and, at the risk of appearing heretical, I will admit I have always counted “The Divine Fire” as one of Miss Sinclair’s unsuccessful experiments, and “The Helpmate” as another. Both have charm and distinction of style, but they have not the insight, the clearness of vision, that mark her later novels. She is, especially in the second, like an artist drawing without models and erring in small details, getting the anatomy of her characters here and there out of proportion. The cleverness and the interest of “The Helpmate” are undeniable, but its people do not wear flesh about them; they are seriously presented, but one feels they are as outside the world of actual humanity as are the brilliant creations that play so deftly in some of the artificial comedies of the Restoration.
“The Creators” is another tale of literary life, and one in which you are not always sure whether the author wishes you to take her poets and novelists in dead earnest or whether she is secretly laughing at them and touching off their idiosyncrasies with a covert irony, the latter suspicion finding encouragement in the neat realism and hard-cut brilliance with which the whole thing is done. Some have complained that several of her novels are too preoccupied with the mysteries and intimacies of sexual relationship, but you might as reasonably complain that other authors exclude these from their scheme of things and are too preoccupied with other and less vitally human experiences. There is no forbidden tree in the garden of literature; all the world is the artist’s parish and he is justified of any theme so long as he can handle it with such artistic success as Miss Sinclair does in “Kitty Tailleur,” in “The Combined Maze,” and in that tragically poignant short story “The Judgment of Eve.”
Perhaps she reaches the highest expression of her genius in this and other of her short stories (“The Wrackham Memoirs” is a little masterpiece of ironic comedy) and in the shortest of her novels, “The Life and Death of Harriet Frean”—the detached pity, the insight, the minute, illuminating realism with which the whole feeble, self-sacrificing, sentimental little soul of Harriet is revealed, and the perfect technique with which it is all set down, give power and beauty to what in less skilled, less sensitive hands might have been a frail, wistful story of no particular significance.
Miss Sinclair is more erudite than the majority of novelists and, outside the world of fiction, has proved herself a suggestive and original thinker in such philosophical subtleties as “A Defence of Idealism.” She worked, during the early stages of the War, with the Red Cross, recording her experiences in “A Journal of Impressions in Belgium,” and she drew on those experiences for scenes in some of her novels, notably in “Tasker Jevons” and in that finer story of the same period, “The Tree of Heaven.”
Literary characters, the literary life, and sex problems enter pretty largely into Miss Sinclair’s novels, but she has never like so many of the successful settled down to run in a groove; she does not repeat herself. She has not accepted ready-made formulas of art but has been continually reaching out for new ways of advance. She was quick to see virtue in the literary method of James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson and the possibilities inherent in the novel which should look on everything through the consciousness of a single one of its characters, and proclaimed it as the type of novel that would have a future. She may not have convinced us of this when she applied the method in the ejaculatory, minutely detailed “Mary Olivier,” but its maturer development in “Harriet Frean” demonstrated that it was a manner which could be used with supreme artistic effectiveness. All the same, the method is not so new as James Joyce; you may find the beginnings of it, employed less self-consciously, with more reticence and more humor, in the first and last novels of that very old-fashioned novelist William De Morgan.
FRANK SWINNERTON
Frank Swinnerton
When his first novel, “The Merry Heart,” was published, in 1909, Frank Swinnerton was still so youthful that I remember persons of my own age had a way of referring to him, with an avuncular air, as “young Swinnerton.” He was twenty-four, but his smooth, boyish face, his unassuming manner, that hovered between a natural vivacity and a sort of shyness, made him look and seem younger than he was. In the fourteen years since then he has done work, as novelist and as critic, that has made him famous on at least two continents, he has grown a moustache and a trim, pointed reddish beard that with the lurking twinkle in his eyes, give him somewhat the appearance of an acute Frenchman (though nobody could, in general, be more thoroughly English), and, so far from being shy, he will now rise on a platform or at a public dinner and make you an admirably serious or witty and humorous address with the completest self-possession.