Part 4

And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot. A gloomy saying, but one which applies to men as well as to empires, and to none, perhaps, more than to those men who stand in the vanguard of literature. Of very few writers, save those who were so fortunate as to be carried away by death in the plenitude of their powers (unless, like Mr Thomas Hardy, they drew back from the battle of letters) can it be said that the works of their later years were equal to those of their maturity. The great man has his heir in the world, one who impatiently waits for his shoes and is assured that he will fill them. It is well so, for shoes must be filled, and it is good to know the claimants.

Who are these men? Is it possible already to designate them? To mark out the Hardy or the Meredith of to-morrow? The Bennett, the Wells, or the Galsworthy? It is difficult. I shall not be surprised if some quarrel with these names, cavil at the selection and challenge a greatness which they look upon as transient. Those critics may be right. I do not, in this article, attempt a valuation of those whom I will call the literary novelists, that is to say, the men who have 'somehow,' and owing to hardly ascertained causes, won their way into the front rank of modern English letters. It may be urged that these are not our big men, and that the brazen blaring of popular trumpets has drowned the blithe piping of tenderer songsters. But, if we view facts sanely, we must all agree that there are in England five men, of whom one is a foreigner, who hold without challenge the premier position among novelists: Mr Arnold Bennett, Mr Joseph Conrad, Mr John Galsworthy, Mr Thomas Hardy, and Mr H. G. Wells. Theirs is a special position: there is not one of them, probably, whose sales would create envy in the bosom of Mr Harold Bell Wright or of Mrs Barclay; nor are they of the super-hyper class whose works are issued in wisely limited editions and printed in over-beautiful type. They are, in a very rough way, the men of their time and, a very little, the men of all time. Whatever be their greatness or their littleness, they are the men who will, for the University Extension Lecturer of 1950, represent the English novel in a given period; they are not the most literary of their contemporaries; they have not more ideas than some of their contemporaries, and all of them have their faults, their mannerisms, and their lapses, but yet, in a rough and general way, these five men combine more ideas with more style than any who are beyond their group. 'Somehow' they stand at the head, and I make no attempt to criticise them, to classify them: I have even named them in alphabetical order. Now not one of these men is under forty; one is over seventy; one approaches sixty. They must be replaced. Not yet, of course, though some of the young begin, a little rashly, to cast stones at those mature glories. But still, some time, faced as we are with a horde of novelists, not less in these islands than fifteen hundred, we must ask ourselves: Who are the young men who rear their heads above the common rank? Which ones among them are likely to inherit the purple?

II

In such an examination we must not ask for achievement, for by young men is meant those who have not passed, or have but lately passed, thirty. That they should show promise at all is remarkable enough, and distinguishes them from their forbears: while Mr Bennett, Mr Galsworthy, and Mr Conrad published no novel at all before they were thirty, and Mr Wells not much more than a fantastic romance, the young men of to-day tell a different tale. Mr J. D. Beresford, Mr Gilbert Cannan, Mr E. M. Forster, Mr D. H. Lawrence, Mr Compton Mackenzie, Mr Oliver Onions, Mr Frank Swinnerton, are a brilliant little stable, and have mostly tried their paces many years earlier; theirs have been the novels of the twenty-eight-year-old, in one case, at least, that of the twenty-six-year-old. They have affirmed themselves earlier than did their seniors and yet quite definitely.

The short list defies challenge, even though some may wish to include an obscurer favourite, some other young intellectual novelist or a more specialised man, such as Mr Algernon Blackwood, Mr Frederick Niven, or Mr James Stephens, or a recent discovery, such as Mr Alec Waugh, Mr J. W. N. Sullivan, Mr Stephen McKenna, or Mr James Joyce; still the classification is a very general one; it is almost undeniable that those are the men among whom will be recruited the leaders of to-morrow. Indeed I have neglected some aspirants, relegated them into a class which will, in a few years give us the inheritors of certain men of high literary quality who, owing to accident to style or to choice of subject, have not laid hands upon literary crowns. But that is inevitable. The seven men selected are those who show promise.

By promise is meant a suggestion that the young man will become a big man, that is to say that, in ten years or so, he will be the vehicle of the modern idea through the style of the time; he may not be very popular, but he will not be unpopular; he will be quoted, criticised, discussed; briefly, he will matter. Now I do not suggest that the seven men named will inevitably become big men. There is not room for seven big novelists, but it is among them that, in all likelihood, the two or three leaders will be found. And then there is the dark horse, still, perhaps, in some university, in America or in a colony, perhaps in a factory or a shop, who may sally forth, swift as a comet, and destroy our estimate; I have at least one such dark horse in my mind. But in a valuation we must reckon on the known, and it is submitted that we know nothing beyond this list.

The manner in which these men will express themselves cannot be determined absolutely. The literary tradition is changing, and a new one is being made. If the future is to give us a Balzac or a Fielding he will not write like a Balzac or a Fielding: he will use a new style. That is why there is very little hope for those who competently follow the tradition of the past. If a _Madame Bovary_ were to be written to-day by a man of thirty it would not be a good book; it would be a piece of literary archaeology. If the seven young men become the men of to-morrow, it will be because they break away from the old traditions, the tradition of aloofness and the tradition of comment. They do not rigidly stand outside the canvas, as did Flaubert and de Maupassant; nor do they obviously intervene as did Thackeray. If they look back at all it is to Dostoievsky and Stendhal, that is to say, they stand midway between the expression of life and the expression of themselves; indeed, they try to express both, to achieve art by 'criticising life'; they attempt to take nature into partnership. Only they do this to a greater or lesser extent; some do little more than exploit themselves, show the world in relation to their own autobiography; others hold up the mirror to life and interpose between picture and object the veil of their prejudice; and one of them is almost a commentator, for his prejudice is so strong as to become a protagonist in his drama. All this is to be expected, for one cannot expect a little group of seven which enjoys the high honour of having been selected from among fifteen hundred, to be made up of identical entities. Indeed, all must be contrasting persons: if two of them were alike, one would be worthless. And so each one has his devil to exorcise and his guardian-angel to watch over him. They must, each one of them, beware of exploiting themselves overmuch of becoming dull as they exhaust their own history of being cold if they draw too thin a strand of temperament across the object which they illumine. But these dangers are only the accidents of a dangerous trade, where a man hazards his soul and may see it grow sick. If we wish to measure these dangers, we must then analyse the men one by one, and it will serve us best to divide them into three groups: self-exploiters, mirror-bearers, and commentators. These are not exact divisions; they overlap on one another; one man denies by one book what he affirms by a second. But, in a very rough way these divisions will serve: hesitations and contradictions indicate, indeed better than achievement, the tempestuous course of promising youth.

III

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.