THE LONDON
MERCURY
Editor—J. C. SQUIRE Assistant-Editor—EDWARD SHANKS
Vol. I No. 3 January 1920
EDITORIAL NOTES
THE first whole year of peace has ended, and it is natural to throw a backward look upon its literary production. It is certain that to the historian it will be a year in which various tendencies continued to act; it is possible that his eye, in long retrospect, will observe in it the appearance, the sudden appearance, of new literary developments and important personalities. But it is, as a rule, only in long retrospect that such portents are recognised as such; and though we think that during the year certain movements which have been for some years in existence have been continued, that there are drifts which are easier to perceive than to analyse, we cannot persuade ourselves that 1919 added more than the normal amount to the existing volume of good English literature. It was, in fact, as a literary year very much like one of the war years. Perhaps it should properly be regarded itself as a war year. The principal physical factor which, in our present relation, operated during the war was the absence on service of the great majority of those young men who would have been beginning to write. These were, with rare exceptions, precluded by sheer force of outer circumstances from literary enterprises of a sustained kind; and, as most of those who survived have left the Army within the last year, we could scarcely expect so soon as this to find them producing large and ambitious books. It may also reasonably be argued that the war-atmosphere still prevails. Peace has come—and it has not yet come universally or conclusively—not suddenly but with the slowness of a northern dawn. Problems from which even the most self-sufficing mind cannot escape harass the intellect and weigh on the spirit of the civilised world. We are not yet in a position to estimate post-war literature, for we have not yet got post-war literature.
The opinions of intelligent men may differ to some extent as to which were the most remarkable novels of 1919; that they were very few is, we conceive, a matter of general agreement. Of the older novelists, Mr. Conrad produced in The Arrow of Gold (a work begun long ago and recently completed) a book which, though not among his masterpieces, was worthy of him. Mr. Wells, in The Undying Fire, a modernisation of the Book of Job, wrote an imaginative, an exciting, and an eloquent book. It was much better shaped and trimmed than has lately been usual with his books, and, for the first time since he abandoned scientific romance, he concentrated entirely on doing what he can do better than other people instead of trying to do what he cannot do. The other elder novelists did nothing that was unexpected and little that was good; and their successors have not appeared. A Fielding or a Dickens is a rare product; but we see no young novelists of whom it can be predicted with any assurance that ten years hence they will occupy places such as are now occupied by Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett. It seems certain that they will not be found amongst that pre-war group whose merits Henry James examined with such generous consideration, whose defects he indicated with such delicate diffidence, in a famous article which "betrayed" rather than stated his alarm, even his pity, for the English Novel. There have been a few books which have attracted attention by their qualities of construction and detail or by touches of original genius; but of most of their authors we could not be sure that they will become even habitual, much less great, novelists. The book which more than any other appeared to us to be notable, both for its workmanship and for its imaginative power, was Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer's Java Head—and Mr. Hergesheimer is an American. It was not so good a book (we think Java Head was the earlier written) as The Three Black Pennys; but the two books are certainly the work of a born novelist. Miss Romer Wilson, whose Martin Schuler (1918) was a vivid, vigorous, and original book, published another, and a dull, novel, If All These Young Men, the subject and setting of which offered less scope to her peculiar gifts: but she is clearly capable of doing something surprising. Miss Dane's Legend was a remarkable technical achievement; and Mr. Cournos's The Mask, Miss Macaulay's fantasia, What Not, and Mr. Brett Young's The Young Physician were all, in their degrees, notable for a poetic quality.