A Novelist on Novels

by Walter Lionel George

Though, broadly speaking, the seven young men are profoundly interested in themselves, there are four that attach especial importance to the life which has made them what they are. Messrs Cannan, Walpole, Beresford, and Lawrence, capable though they be of standing outside themselves, are, without much doubt, happier when they stand inside. I do not know in extreme detail where they were born or what they suffered, but it demands no great sagacity to reconstruct, for instance, Mr Walpole as a man who went to Cambridge, taught in a school, and later wrote books; likewise Mr Beresford, as one who struggled up against poverty and physical infirmity into a place in the sunshine of letters; Mr Cannan is still more emphatically interested in the reactions of his own harsh and sensitive temperament, while Mr Lawrence, a little more puzzling, is very much the lover of life, telling us tales of his mistress. This is not, perhaps, because they take these facts that lie nearest to their hand as the argument of their play. Each one of them has shown by some excursion that he was capable of jerking the earth off its axis, the axis being, with him as with all of us, his own personality. Thus Mr Cannan, in Peter Homunculus, presents in Meredithian wise, a picture of the development of a very young man, a rather romantic though metallically brilliant young man predestined by nature to have a bad, but very exciting time: that is Mr Cannan. More clearly still, in Little Brother, he takes himself up again, himself wondering in Cambridge 'what it's all for,' as Mr Wells would say, wondering still more, and still more vainly, when he enters London's cultured circles, from which he escapes through an obscure byway of Leicester Square. And then again, in Round the Corner, it is, a very little, Mr Cannan in Manchester, incredulously examining, and through Serge commenting upon the world. Were it not for Devious Ways one would be inclined to think that Mr Cannan had nothing to say except about himself, and, indeed, it is disquieting to think that the book which saves him from such a conclusion is inferior to his subjective work. Still, it is not altogether a bad book; it is not the sort of book with which Mr Cannan will bid for fame, but it represents the streak of detachment which is essential if this author is to show himself able to stand outside his own canvas; moreover, in Round the Corner, Mr Cannan was less limited by himself than he was in his previous books. The praise that has been showered on this novel was perfervid and indiscriminate; it was not sufficiently taken into account that the book was congested, that the selection of details was not unerring, and that the importation of such a character as Serge laid the author open to the imputation of having recently read Sanin; but, all this being said, it is certain that Round the Corner, with its accurate characterisation, its atmospheric sense and its diversity, marked a definite stage in the evolution of Mr Cannan. Though refusing to accept it as work of the first rank, I agree that it is an evidence of Mr Cannan's ability to write work of the first rank: he may never write it, but this book is his qualification for entering the race. His later novels, Young Earnest and Mendel, have done him no good; they are too closely related to his own life; his private emotions are also too active in his pacifist skit, Windmills, which is inferior to The Tale of a Tub. Other novels, too, such as Three Pretty Men and The Stucco House, exhibit painful superiority over the ordinary person; lacking humour, it seems that Mr Cannan has taken himself too seriously, one might almost say, too dramatically; those sufferings, misunderstandings, isolations, and struggles of his youth have been to him too vivid and too significant. For a long time his picture fogged his vision; he could not see himself for himself. But he may come to view more sanely the epic of his own life and more wholly the epic of the life of others. If he will consent to be less the actor and more the spectator, he will probably succeed in becoming the playwright.

Mr Walpole does not, so definitely as Mr Cannan, view the world in terms of his own life, his personality is otherwise tinged: he is less angry, less chafed, and it may be that because he is of the softer Southern breed, he has no share in the dour aggressiveness of Mr Cannan's North country. And there is a variation in the self that Mr Walpole paints: it is not what he is, or even what he thinks he is, but what he would like to be. In his chief work, by which is meant the most artistic, Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, the writer shares with us much of the wistfulness he must have felt in his early manhood, but Mr Traill is not Mr Walpole; if he were, he would have recurred in other novels; he is the simple, delicate, and passionate young man (passionate, that is, in the modest English way), that Mr Walpole would like to be. This we know because Mr Walpole loves Traill and sees no weakness in him: now, one may love that which one despises, but that which one admires one must love. No lover can criticise his lady, if his lady she is to remain, and thus, in his incapacity to see aught save charm in his hero, Mr Walpole indicates the direction of his own desire. Yet, and strangely enough, in The Prelude to Adventure, there is a suggestion that Mr Walpole would gladly be Dune, haughty and sombre; in Fortitude, that he would be Peter Westcott, have his fine courage, his delicacy and his faith. He asks too much in wishing to be Proteus, but, in so doing, he puts forward a claim to talent, for he tells us his aspiration rather than his realisation. Indeed, if it were not that The Prelude to Adventure is so very much his life in Cambridge, Mr Perrin and Mr Traill his career in a little school, Fortitude his life under the influence of London's personality, he would not come into the class of those men who make copy of their past. And it is a feature of high redeeming value that in Maradick at Forty, he should have attempted to make copy of his future, for, again, here is aspiration. Mr Walpole needs to increase his detachment and widen the fields which he surveys. Schools and Cambridge: these are tales of little boys and their keepers; literary London: that is the grasshopper and its summer singing. He needs to develop, to embrace business and politics, the commonness of love, and the vital roughness of the world. He has tried to do this in The Dark Forest, but this is so close a pastiche of Russian novels that it cannot stand for Mr Walpole's emancipation.

IV

In Mr Beresford we discover a closer identity between the man and the mask, though he has written several books where he does not figure, The Hampdenshire Wonder, the tale of an incredible child, The House in Demetrius Road, and Goslings, a fantastic commentary upon life. Mr Beresford is more at his ease when he tells his own tale. In three books, The Early History of Jacob Stahl, A Candidate for Truth, and The Invisible Event, Mr Beresford has exploited himself with some eloquence; he has the sense of selection, he is not crabbed, and he informs with fine passion those early years through which fleets a fine woman figure. In these books, as also in Housemates, Mr Beresford shows that he knows love, and isolation, and pain: those other young men with whom we are concerned feel these things, too, but hardly one so passionately. Mr Beresford's merit is that he is more ordinary, thus that he is less unreal than the passionate persons his rivals are or would be. Yet, if this were all, it might not be enough, for a tale may be told twice but not more often; if, in the first part of Goslings, Mr Beresford had not shown how closely and incisively he can picture the lower-middle class, analyse its ambitions, sympathise with its hopes, his would be a limited scope. I hope he will go further in this direction, extend his criticism of life through more of those people and more of their fates, while he himself remains outside. He must choose: Jacob Stahl, that is Mr Beresford, is a charming creature whom one would gladly know; but Jasper Thrale, expounding the world, is not Mr Beresford, for he is a prig. Mr Beresford may run on two lines: one for himself alone, and one for the world as he sees it.

Mr D. H. Lawrence's is not in the same class. Once only can he have been autobiographical; either in The White Peacock, or in Sons and Lovers, for he could evidently not have been, at the same time, the poetic son of a collier and a cultured member of the well-to-do classes in a farming community. Probably it is an open secret that Mr Lawrence is closer to the Nottingham collier than to the rustic who made hay while others played Bach. But it does not matter very much whether he be one or the other; it is not his physical self he puts into his books, but the adventures of his temperament. It is a curious temperament, a mixture of Northern brutality with wistful Northern melancholy. His characters, and this applies to George and Lettice in The White Peacock, to Sigmund, in The Trespasser, to Paul Morel, Mrs Morel, and Miriam, in Sons and Lovers, are always battling with adversity for the sake of their fine hopes, are held up by their pride, and divorced a little from commoner folk by the taste that takes them to Verlaine and Lulli. If it is Mr Lawrence to whom every flower of the hedge and every feather of the strutting cock cries colour and passionate life, if it is for him that the water-meadows are fragrant and the star-lit nights endless deep, it is not for him that the characters live, but for us: he takes his share, he leaves us ours; he inflames his characters, then allows them to act. Indeed, if no fault were to be found with him on mere literary score, Mr Lawrence would be more than a man of promise: he would have arrived. But his passion carries him away; he sees too much, shows too much, he analyses too fully, discovers too many elements. It may be urged that no artist can see or analyse too fully. But he can, if he discovers that which is not there. Mr Lawrence, having found gold in the dross of common men and women, is inclined to infer that there is too much gold in the vulgar. Being convinced of this, he becomes hectic; his people are as flames, feeding upon mortal bodies and burning them up. His peril is excessive sensation. He needs some better knowledge of affairs, more intercourse with the cruder rich, with the drab middle-class, so that his brilliant vision may by its dulling become tolerable to meaner eyes. He needs to discover those for whom music hath no charms, and yet are not base in attitude.

Mr Lawrence, who exploits his life not over much, affords us a necessary transition between those who are interested in little else and the second group, Mr Mackenzie, Mr Onions, and Mr Swinnerton, who have, with more or less success, tried to stand back as they write. Of these, Mr Compton Mackenzie is the most interesting because, in three volumes, he has made three new departures: The Passionate Elopement, a tale of powder and patches; Carnival, a romance of the meaner parts of London and of Charing Cross Road, and lastly Sinister Street, where he links up with those who exploit only their experiences. Evidently Mr Mackenzie believes that a good terrier never shakes a rat twice. Had Sinister Street been his first contribution to literature, Mr Mackenzie would have found his place indicated in the first group, but as he began by standing outside himself it must be assumed that he thought it a pity to let so much good copy go begging. He is a man difficult of assessment because of his diversity. He has many graces of style, and a capacity which may be dangerous of infusing charm into that which has no charm. He almost makes us forget that the heroine of Carnival is a vulgar little Cockney, by tempting us to believe that it might have been otherwise with her. There is a cheapness of sentiment about this Jenny, this Islington columbine, but we must not reproach Mr Mackenzie for loving his heroine over-much: too many of his rivals are not loving theirs enough. Indeed, his chief merit is that he finds the beautiful and the lovable more readily than the hideous. His figures can serve as reagents against the ugly heroine and the scamp hero who grew fashionable twenty years ago. His success, if it comes at all, will be due to his executive rather than to his artistic quality, for he often fails to sift his details. In Sinister Street, we endure a great congestion of word and interminable catalogues of facts and things. If he has a temperament at all, which I believe, it is stifled by the mantle in which he clothes it. It is not that Mr Mackenzie knows too much about his characters, for that is not possible, but he tells us too much. He does not give our imagination a chance to work. His romantic earnestness, as shown in Guy and Pauline, is unrelieved by humour and makes those details wearisome. Yet, his hat is in the ring. If he can prune his efflorescent periods and select among his details he may, by force of charm, attain much further than his fellows. He will have to include just those things and no others which can give us an illusion of the world.

V

In direct opposition to Mr Mackenzie, we find Mr Onions. While Mr Mackenzie gives us too much and allows us to give nothing, Mr Onions gives us hardly anything and expects us to write his novel for him as we read it. There are two strands in his work, one of them fantastic and critical, the other creative. Of the first class are the tales of Widdershins, and The Two Kisses, a skit on studios and boarding-houses. Even slightly more massive works, such as the love epic of advertisement, Good Boy Seldom, and the fierce revelation of disappointment which is in Little Devil Doubt do not quite come into the second class; they are not the stones on which Mr Onions is to build. They are a destructive criticism of modern life, and criticism, unless it is creative, is a thing of the day, however brilliant it may seem. Mr Oliver Onions can be judged only on his trilogy, In Accordance with the Evidence, The Debit Account, and The Story of Louie, for these are creative works, threaded and connected; they are an attempt and, on the whole, a very successful one, to take a section of life and to view it from different angles. If the attempt has not completely succeeded, it is perhaps because it was too much. It rests upon close characterisation, a sense of the iron logic of facts and upon atmospheric quality. There is not a young man, and for the matter of that an old one, more than Mr Onions, capable of anatomical psychology. There may be autobiography in some of Mr Onions's work, but there is in his trilogy no more than should colour any man's book.

Yet Mr Onions has his devil, and it takes the form of a rage against the world, of a hatred that seems to shed a bilious light over his puppets. His strong men are hard, almost brutal, inconsiderate, dominant only by dint of intellect, and arrogant in their dominance; his weak men are craven, lying, incapable of sweetness; even strong Louie is so haughty as almost to be rude. All this appears in the very style, so much so that, were it not for the cliché, I would quote Buffon. The sentences are tortured as if born in agony; the highly selected detail is reluctant, avaricious, as if Mr Onions hated giving the world anything. And yet, all this culminates in an impression of power: Mr Onions is the reticent man whose confidence, when earned, is priceless. He lays no pearls before us; he holds them in his half-extended hand for us to take if we can. Some tenderness; some belief that men can be gentle and women sweet; a little more hope and some pity, and Mr Onions will be judged more fairly.

Of Mr Swinnerton, who also stands outside his canvas, one is not so sure. He made, in The Casement, an elusive picture of the life of the well-to-do when confronted with the realities of life, but did not succeed emphatically enough in the more ponderous effort entitled The Happy Family. There he was too uniform, too mechanical, and rather too much bound by literary traditions. He was so bound also in his brilliant Nocturne, the tragedy of five creatures within a single night. But Mr Swinnerton has a point of view, an attitude toward life; I could not define it, but am conscious of its existence, and in a man of promise that is quite enough. For a man with an individual attitude will make it felt if he has the weapons of style with which to express it. Now Mr Swinnerton shows great dexterity in the use of words, felicity of phrase, a discrimination in the choice of details which will enable him to embody such ideas as he may later on conceive. He has only to fear that he may be mistaken as to the size of his ideas; like Mr Hugh de Selincourt, he may be too much inclined to take as the plot of a novel an idea and a story in themselves too slender. Under modern publishing conditions he may be compelled to spin out his work: as his tendency is to concentrate, he may find himself so much hampered as to lose the chief charm of his writing, viz., balance. He has shown charm in Nocturne, some power in The Happy Family; these two qualities need blending, so that Mr Swinnerton be no longer two men, but one.