THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN. By F. Brett Young. Collins. 7s. net.
POOR RELATIONS. By Compton Mackenzie. Secker. 7s. 6d. net.
THE TENDER CONSCIENCE. By Bohun Lynch. Secker. 7s. net.
SEPTEMBER. By Frank Swinnerton. Methuen. 7s. net.
TIME AND ETERNITY. By Gilbert Cannan. Chapman & Hall. 7s. net.
RICHARD KURT. By Stephen Hudson. Secker. 7s. net.
The literary arena of England is at this moment strewn with the forms of discouraged novelists who were hailed as coming great men and who have never yet been able to make any adequate reply to the hail. The arrival of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett, as writers concerning whom, in whatever tenor, our questions are answered, is within recent memory. Soon after that event a new generation rose. Henry James stooped from Olympus to examine them; and there was a good deal of excitement abroad as to their future performance. But where are they now? Mr. Walpole's latest book carries the history of a child up to his first departure from school. Mr. Compton Mackenzie shows us a popular dramatist struggling for life in the midst of a farcical crowd of relations. Mr. Swinnerton produces punctually one book a year in time for the autumn publishing season. But meanwhile what is happening to the English novel? Is anything happening to it?
It is certainly true that there is no perceptible curve of development or change. There are fashions. Two of the books before us illustrate one of the most popular of them, a fashion begun and now abandoned by Mr. Mackenzie. Mr. Walpole pushes the novel of adolescence to its extreme, or beyond the extreme, by the tender age at which he takes his hero. Mr. Brett Young goes through with it in conventional fashion, conducting Edwin Ingleby from early years at school to his final medical examination and the beginning of life. Mr. Walpole's Jeremy is a very faithful and exact record, and yet it is not easy to say why he should have written it.
Mary, however, was there, and in the very middle of her game, searching for him, as she was always doing, she found him desolate under the shadow of the oak. She slipped away, and, coming up to him with the shyness and fear that she always had when she approached him, because she loved him so much and he could so easily hurt her, said:
"Aren't you coming to play, Jeremy?"
"I don't care," he answered gruffly.
"It isn't any fun without you." She paused and added: "Would you mind if I stayed here too?"
"I'd rather you played," he said; and yet he was comforted by her, determined, as he was, that she should never know it!
"I'd rather stay," she said, and then gazed with that melancholy stare through her large spectacles, that always irritated Jeremy, out across the garden.
"I'm all right," he said again; "only my stocking tickles, and I can't get at it—it's the back of my leg. I say, Mary, don't you hate the Dean's Ernest?"
A not too exigent reader might still fail to be surprised or delighted by that passage or by a hundred like it, and of such passages the book is made up. If Mr. Walpole continues the child's career on the same scale his followers will groan; and yet perhaps as Jeremy grew older he might grow more interesting. For it is unlikely that, except in rare cases, a grown man will remember enough of childhood to make the material of a long novel. And the character of even the most remarkable child is not, after all, sufficiently broad, sufficiently varied, to bear the weight of this exhaustive description.