—and the glitter and varnish of an upholstered narrative casually spangled with Meredithean brightness. But Mr. Mackenzie's second novel, Carnival, disappointed expectation by being readable. Like some of its successors, it might be mistaken for realistic; while another, Guy and Pauline, might be termed idyllic by those who love the phrase. He moves and changes; he is a part of all that he has met; and you wonder at length what he is. For myself, I am reminded frequently of an ingenious character seen in provincial music-halls, who to the eyes of a happy audience swiftly and imperceptibly invests and divests himself of many costumes of marvellous hue—one growing plain as another is impetuously flung off, blue gloves giving place to pink, a crimson shirt to an emerald, a shooting-jacket to a dinner-jacket—until I laugh unrestrainably.
Mr. Mackenzie has not sought a fugitive and cloistered virtue; his characters, as Johnson said of Gilbert Walmsley, mingle in the great world without exemption from its follies and its vices. He loves their activities; he sets them going and follows their whirring motion with the ruthless gaiety of a child playing with toys, who stops them, breaks them, and sometimes sets them going again. He understands mechanics and they must move; and when they are run down in one book he winds them up again for another. He hurries hither and thither, clutching at the skirts of perpetual motion like that other pageant master, time. His scene is the capitals of Europe or a railway train between them. He shares with his characters, of whatever age, their brilliant youth. He invents untiringly. He does not vex himself or his readers with description, but if he pauses to paint he paints with unmistakable bright colours. He writes clearly: there is seldom a slovenly sentence, never a memorable one. He has a cruelly accurate ear for slang, and presents vulgarity with fond verisimilitude. Femininity haunts him; his flowers, even, remind him of frills. Something of extreme youth clings to his books—its zestfulness, curiosity, indiscriminateness, and its unregretful volatility. But when, you may ask, remembering at once his gifts and his opportunities, his gifts and the world amid which they are exercised, when will he grow up? When, rather, will he grow down and strike first roots into the dark earth of the mind? When, amid all his brisk preoccupations with men and women, will he touch life?
Leaving generalisation, it is interesting to look at one of the simplest of Mr. Mackenzie's novels, Guy and Pauline, published in 1915, and conspicuously dedicated to the Commander-in-Chief and the General Staff of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. It is the story of Guy Hazlewood (wound up again after Sinister Street) and a rector's daughter. Guy, returned from Macedonian Relief Fund work, is charmed by a watery Oxfordshire house called Plashers Mead, and settles there to write poetry. The rectory family are his neighbours, and with the rector's daughters, Margaret, Monica, and Pauline, he quickly obtains a brotherly footing, and then becomes engaged to the youngest. The rector is a shadowy gardener with a singular fondness for answering every question, upon whatever subject and of whatever importance, by a reference to a blossoming or decaying plant; an idiosyncrasy which is supposed to endear him to his family. And it is an "endearing" book. Everybody is unvaryingly sweet; the adjective is as common and as adhesive as mud. The three girls form a group of the kind for which the far more finely observant and delicate art of Miss Viola Meynell (among living novelists) has already obtained and exhausted our sympathy. Ungracious as the comparison must seem to both writers, it is irresistible and fatal. Linked sweetness too long drawn out becomes tiresome, and the indistinct softness of the style makes the book something more than tiresome.
Pauline hurried through a shower to church on Easter morning, and shook mingled tears and raindrops from herself when she saw that Guy was come to Communion. So then that angel had travelled from her bedside last night to hover over Guy and bid him wake early next morning, because it was Easter Day. With never so holy a calm had she knelt in the jewelled shadows of that chancel or returned from the altar to find her pew imparadised. When the people came out of church the sun was shining, and on the trees and on the tombstones a multitude of birds were singing. Never had Pauline felt the spirit of Eastertide uplift her with such a joy, joy for her lover beside her, joy for summer close at hand, joy for all the joy that Easter could bring to the soul.
Elsewhere:
The apple trees were already frilled with a foam of blossom; and on quivering boughs linnets with breasts rose-burnt by the winds of March throbbed out their carol. Chaffinches with flashing prelude of silver wings flourished a burst of song that broke as with too intolerable a triumph: then sought another tree and poured forth the triumphant song again. Thrushes, blackbirds and warblers quired deep-throated melodies against the multitudinous trebles of those undistinguished myriads that with choric pæan saluted May; and on sudden diminuendoes could be heard the rustling canzonets of the goldfinches, rising and falling with reedy cadences.
The story is clogged by Guy's meditations upon "poetical ambition"—he is in the early twenties—and yet, with all these grievous handicaps, it survives with sufficient force to express the poignancy with which an incomplete passion may sink to oblivion. In Pauline Mr. Mackenzie has succeeded in showing with simplicity and truth the quick development of a child to a passionate, then a despairing, and at last a forsaken woman; and in Guy the æsthetic frog swollen to a fraction larger than his nature and then relapsing into insignificance. I am not sure that the best of this novelist's achievement is not seen in the isolation of these characters, the sufficiency of quiet incident, and the sense—faintly yet perceptibly communicated—that the tragedy of separation is implicit in the persons of his story. The atmosphere may seem close, the setting fanciful, scenes, characters, and action diminished and slightly prettified; yet there is genuine movement, rise and decline. The occasion of Guy's last parting from Pauline is worth noting, if only because Guy happens to be but the present name of Mr. Mackenzie's invariable young man from Oxford; let it be remembered, however, that Guy reappears years after in Sylvia and Michael as a larger shadow and dies with the Serbians before Nish.
"Even if temporarily I were interested in another girl, you may be quite sure that she would always be second to you."
"But you might be interested?" Pauline asked breathlessly.
"I must be free if I'm going to be an artist."
"Free?" she echoed slowly.
There remains a negative merit. If the artist, as a hundred critics have asserted and a thousand authors forgotten, is proved by what he omits, it must be counted to Mr. Mackenzie for a virtue that this book of four hundred pages does not contain a single seduction, and that, despite the obvious piquancy of a contrast between Plashers Mead and a London night-club, he has so easily and so blessedly avoided it.
The point is the more proper for remembrance inasmuch as such forbearance is the last straining of the quality of mercy in this author. Mr. Mackenzie commonly prefers cities to country scenes, although a country scene in his earliest novel yielded him his first opportunity of teasing innocent readers with an unsavoury interior. Since he is a cultured writer you might imagine that Hogarth had tutored him; but Hogarth is immensely masculine, and the origin of our novelist's inspiration need be sought no farther back than the 'nineties. Nothing is more surprising, at any rate to men approaching middle-age, than the fitful incandescence of that spark with which the 'nineties were tinily illuminated. The inferior intelligence and the yet more inferior imagination which impelled certain artists—pleased with the phrase decadent—to magnify the ferment of youthful senses, may now seem even more trivial in their fruition than an Olympian judgment would allow. But it is hard to be impartial when a purely remote contemplation is forbidden by the flashing reflections from living writers who are only in a narrow sense contemporary writers. Coventry Patmore, chief poet and almost chief artist in that church of which we hear so much in Mr. Mackenzie's novels, asserted with more force than originality that what is morally bad is necessarily bad art; and he proceeded to say, less tritely, that the delicate indecency of so much modern art was partly due to deficient virility which, in proportion to its strength, is naturally modest. Pleading for plain-speaking, he maintained that indecency (which only a fool could identify with plain-speaking) is an endeavour to irritate sensations and appetites in the absence of natural passion; that which passes with so many for power and ardour being really, in his certain and indignant eyes, impotence and coldness. The distinction between plain-speaking and delicate indecency is to be remembered when Mr. Mackenzie's most ambitious attempts at the English novel, Sinister Street and Sylvia Scarlett, are considered. There may be coarseness of expression, a fondness for trivial bluntness of phrase; but it would be stupid to see in that more than coarseness or bluntness. The theme of Sinister Street, says the author, is the youth of a man who will presumably be a priest; a theme developed in nearly four hundred thousand words by something like the process of "annual elongation" which Johnson observed in a Hebridean road. The book moves upon familiar biographical lines—the lonely children, the local school and lesser public school, Oxford, and the betrayed passion for a prostitute. It is an enormous and minute chronicle—of what? Of the externals of a boy's life, of the customs of school, flirtation with vulgar girls, evasions of school tasks, the ways of a decrepit group surviving from the 'nineties, Catholic ritual, and a little introspection here and there; and then, in the second volume, of the same externals of Oxford life drawn to the same scale. Such a scheme must needs attract the tens who have been to public school and University, and delight the tens of thousands who haven't. Is it taking a mean advantage of time's passage to compare Sinister Street with Serge Aksakoff's Years of Childhood and its successors? Aksakoff treats childhood with a simplicity, a quiet intentness, by the side of which Mr. Mackenzie's enormous reconstruction seems loose and artificial. Sinister Street is vast in size and meagre in content. It is packed with superfluities. Three-fourths of it is inessential to the author's declared intention; it is no more than a guide-book cleverly designed (e.g., the first week at Oxford) to evoke an illusion of Oxford in Pimlico and Shepherd's Bush; and concentrating upon the remaining fourth, you feel that your author has been aware of little more than the physiology of adolescence and the usual facile religious reactions. Boys from seventeen to twenty-three, girls from sixteen to any age, may find in Henry Meats alias Brother Aloysius, in Arthur Wilmot the last of the Decadents, in the Lilys and the Daisys of the streets, in the whole rank multitude of Mr. Mackenzie's "underworld," the irritation of sensation which adolescents naturally seek. Here may curiosity be half-satisfied, half-stimulated. A Guide to Prostitution could add little to the informations of Sinister Street: the dress, the habitation, even the finances of those who have "gone gay," are meticulously recorded. Passed, I am afraid, are the Orient promenade and the underground gilded sty, but their glory is not departed, it is merely transferred, and Sinister Street remains sufficiently lively and up to date to provoke the youngest and make the oldest feel young again. Do you ask why God gives brains for such a use? I cannot even guess. Mr. Mackenzie astonishingly blazons his book with Keats's famous analysis: "The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, etc."—an astonishing phrase for index to this book; whether used in simplicity or in subtle defiance, this also I cannot guess. Clear enough is it that what passes for imagination is no other than the froth of yesty waves of youth.... It is a book written, if offence may be disavowed and avoided, by a boy for boys. Mr. Mackenzie himself, in his introductory letter, refers to his study of Russian writers (this in explanation of the length of his novels), and in his epilogical letter he apparently regards the book as a work of art. An author's opinion of his own intention is to be respected, for who shall challenge it? It does but afford an additional ground for judgment and surprise.