—Farce at least is unpretentious, but this crude jargon, this retroverted intellectualism, is offensive beyond farce, odious beyond "delicate indecency."
It may not be wholly due to perversity if the characteristics of these long biographical novels should overshadow the sharp merits of, say, Carnival. Carnival, even better than Guy and Pauline, may serve as a measure of Mr. Mackenzie's decline from his promise; since although its conclusion is a disharmony, its best chapters are good enough to cause a reader to sigh over the later novels. Was it, indeed, quite a worthless aim to follow in the footsteps of George Gissing? Carnival suggests that a new Gissing might have grown up before our eyes, with a touch of the same veracity, the same mordancy, and a little less than the same humourless and dishumoured regard for what is wry and hapless; but Carnival stands alone, and the exactions of that difficult sincerity have been put by.... Or take, again, Poor Relations, the latest of Mr. Mackenzie's inventions. With its ease and brilliant vivacities, with the comedy of its conception, what a delightful play it would make! But might not the comedy have depended—as comedy must—more surely upon character and less upon incident? The author of Sylvia Scarlett, however, has imposed a too-swift facility upon the author of Poor Relations. If practice makes perfect, then nothing was wanting to the completeness of Poor Relations—but how much is wanting! Admirable are the opening notes, but of the rest too much is a brisk falsetto. There is excess in the situations, excess in the characterisation, excess in the style:
When he looked at the old lady he could not discover anything except a cold egotism in every fold of those flabby cheeks where the powder lay like drifted snow in the ruts of a sunless lane.
It is equally the virtue and the fault of Mr. Mackenzie that he provokes melancholy regrets, even in the middle of frequent chuckles; and when the chuckling has died away the shadow of Sylvia Scarlett falls upon the book, just as with the same unhappy denigration it is flung backwards over the better qualities of the earlier Carnival.
Yet Poor Relations, like Guy and Pauline, is free from the worst flaw of the longer novels, the crude determination to shock, which breaks most starkly through the superficialities of Sylvia Scarlett. That is a breach of the code of art rather than the code of morals, an eruptive épatism which would disfigure a better book, if it could be found there. Can you conceive a more attractive subject, if you are but three-and-twenty, than the philosophic harlot? Or an easier? I do not suppose that it is less interesting to be on the streets than to be in the Ministry of Food; neither occupation can be objectionable as subject of a novel. It would be untrue to say that the subject of a novel is a thing of complete indifference, and that the treatment is everything; for a writer would not do wisely to forfeit the advantage which a subject might offer him. But neither would he do wisely in exploiting a subject only to excite the curiosity or astonish the simplicity of his reader. Merely adventitious at best is the gain. It is to reduce subject and treatment to their lowest terms, and reject the implicit conditions which confront every writer who would explore the imaginative world where there can be no laws save honour, loyalty, and delicacy. The scientific writer is secured against deceiving himself or his readers for long; his assumptions can be verified, his deductions precisely analysed, his whole professions rationally weighed. The imaginative and the quasi-imaginative writer have no such security, nor their readers such protection. Traditional values may be inapplicable; it is hard to discriminate novelty from originality. A book that shocks may be as profoundly conceived as Jude the Obscure, as cheaply fashioned as Sylvia Scarlett. Incident may be prodigal equally in Dostoieffsky and Mr. Compton Mackenzie, but significance of incident may vary infinitely. Mr. Mackenzie's incidents have no significance; they remain incidents. His thoughts are insignificant except in so far as they indicate a modern intellectual disvertebration. His view of character is insignificant except in so far as it betrays an adolescent apprehension. Who is Sylvia? you ask, and your author is silent. What is she? and the answer is dispersed among eight hundred garrulous pages.
Yet, it must be repeated, Mr. Mackenzie has conspicuous gifts, and, as the letters with which Sinister Street opens and closes indicate, he is aware of them, and has not undertaken these enormous fictions without a sense of his task. But he has accepted the easier way. He can invest his scene with an illusion of activity, if not of reality, but he is unable to picture reality, for he does not distinguish; neither does he create a reality, a world for himself, amenable to its own laws, establishing its own consistency. That would be a wonderful but a hard thing. Amid the booths of his Vanity Fair he moves, not soberly and critically as Christian and Faithful moved, but as one swiftly enchanted by externals. He approaches the field of imaginative art, and I cannot say that his powers and pretensions are such as must discourage entry; but for imagination he learns to substitute invention, chooses the superficial, and does not even trouble to secure the consistency of his characters; Michael Fane's mother, for instance, being declined from an irregular great lady in Volume One to a parish imbecile in Volume Two. He might have chosen otherwise. His alertness, his preoccupation with externals, his fullness of incident, his soft fluency of style might have been flogged into subordination; he need not have been very serious to have taken his work seriously. But all that he promises now is, if the tempting derangement of a line by a modern poet be pardonable:
A torment of intolerable tales.
Mr. Mackenzie has divagated. The task of presenting reality is left to the scientific mind, and the task of creating another reality is left to the poetic mind.