we feel it not to be the paradox it may at the first blush seem that the state of the novel in england at the present time is virtually very much the state of criticism itself; and this moreover, at the risk perhaps of some added appearance of perverse remark, by the very reason that we see criticism so much in abeyance. so far as we miss it altogether how and why does its “state” matter, and why and how can it or should it, as an absent force, enjoy a relation to that constant renewal of our supply of fiction which is a present one so far as a force at all? the relation is this, in the fewest words: that no equal outpouring of matter into the mould of literature, or what roughly passes for such, has been noted to live its life and maintain its flood, its level at least of quantity and mass, in such free and easy independence of critical attention. it constitutes a condition and a perversity on the part of this element to remain irresponsive before an appeal so vociferous at least and so incessant; therefore how can such a neglect of occasions, so careless a habit in spite of marked openings, be better described than as responsibility declined in the face of disorder? the disorder thus determines the relation, from the moment we feel that it might be less, that it might be different, that something in the way of an order even might be disengaged from it and replace it; from the moment in fact that the low critical pitch is logically reflected in the poetic or, less pedantically speaking, the improvisational at large. the effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. this action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its so ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. this is the very education of our imaginative life; and thanks to it the general question of how to refine, and of why certain things refine more and most, on that happy consciousness, becomes for us of the last importance. then we cease to be only instinctive and at the mercy of chance, feeling that we can ourselves take a hand in our satisfaction and provide for it, making ourselves safe against dearth, and through the door opened by that perception criticism enters, if we but give it time, as a flood, the great flood of awareness; so maintaining its high tide unless through some lapse of our sense for it, some flat reversion to instinct alone, we block up the ingress and sit in stale and shrinking waters. stupidity may arrest any current and fatuity transcend any privilege. the comfort of those who at such a time consider the scene may be a little, with their curiosity still insistent, to survey its platitude and record the exhibited shrinkage; which amounts to the attempt to understand how stupidity could so have prevailed. we take it here that the answer to that inquiry can but be ever the same. the flood of “production” has so inordinately exceeded the activity of control that this latter anxious agent, first alarmed but then indifferent, has been forced backward out of the gate, leaving the contents of the reservoir to boil and evaporate. it is verily on the wrong side of the gate that we just now seem to see criticism stand, for never was the reservoir so bubblingly and noisily full, at least by the superficial measure of life. we have caught the odd accident in the very fact of its occurrence; we have seen the torrent swell by extravagant cheap contribution, the huge increase of affluents turbid and unstrained. beyond number are the ways in which the democratic example, once gathering momentum, sets its mark on societies and seasons that stand in its course. nowhere is that example written larger, to our perception, than in “the new novel”; though this, we hasten to add, not in the least because prose fiction now occupies itself as never before with the “condition of the people,” a fact quite irrelevant to the nature it has taken on, but because that nature amounts exactly to the complacent declaration of a common literary level, a repudiation the most operative even if the least reasoned of the idea of differences, the virtual law, as we may call it, of sorts and kinds, the values of individual quality and weight in the presence of undiscriminated quantity and rough-and-tumble “output”—these attestations made, we naturally mean, in the air of composition and on the esthetic plane, if such terms have still an attenuated reference to the case before us. with which, if we be asked, in the light of that generalisation, whether we impute to the novel, or in other words the novelist, all the stupidity against which the spirit of appreciation spends itself in vain, we reply perforce that we stop short of that, it being too obvious that of an exhibition so sterilised, so void of all force and suggestion, there would be nothing whatever to say. our contention is exactly that, in spite of all vain aspects, it does yet present an interest, and that here and there seem written on it likelihoods of its presenting still more—always on condition of its consenting to that more intimate education which is precisely what democratised movements look most askance at. it strikes us as not too much to say that our actual view of the practice of fiction gives as just a measure as could be desired of the general, the incurable democratic suspicion of the selective and comparative principles in almost any application, and the tendency therewith to regard, and above all to treat, one manner of book, like one manner of person, as, if not absolutely as good as another, yet good enough for any democratic use. criticism reflects contentiously on that appearance, though it be an appearance in which comfort for the book and the manner much resides; so that the idea prompting these remarks of our own is that the comfort may be deeply fallacious.

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still not to let go of our imputation of interest to some part at least of what is happening in the world of production in this kind, we may say that non-selective and non-comparative practice appears bent on showing us all it can do and how far or to what appointed shores, what waiting havens and inviting inlets, the current that is mainly made a current by looseness, by want of observable direction, shall succeed in carrying it. we respond to any sign of an intelligent view or even of a lively instinct—which is why we give the appearance so noted the benefit of every presumption as to its life and health. it may be that the dim sense is livelier than the presentable reason, but even that is no graceless fact for us, especially when the keenness of young curiosity and energy is betrayed in its pace, and betrayed, for that matter, in no small abundance and variety. the new or at least the young novel is up and doing, clearly, with the best faith and the highest spirits in the world; if we but extend a little our measure of youth indeed, as we are happily more and more disposed to, we may speak of it as already chin-deep in trophies. the men who are not so young as the youngest were but the other day very little older than these: mr. joseph conrad, mr. maurice hewlett and mr. galsworthy, mr. h. g. wells and mr. arnold bennett, have not quite perhaps the early bloom of mr. hugh walpole, mr. gilbert cannan, mr. compton mackenzie and mr. d. h. lawrence, but the spring unrelaxed is still, to our perception, in their step, and we see two or three of them sufficiently related to the still newer generation in a quasi-parental way to make our whole enumeration as illustrational as we need it. mr. wells and mr. arnold bennett have their strongest mark, the aspect by which we may most classify them, in common—even if their three named contemporaries are doubtless most interesting in one of the connections we are not now seeking to make. the author of “tono-bungay” and of “the new machiavelli,” and the author of “the old wives’ tale” and of “clayhanger,” have practically launched the boat in which we admire the fresh play of oar of the author of “the duchess of wrexe,” and the documented aspect exhibited successively by “round the corner,” by “carnival” and “sinister street,” and even by “sons and lovers” (however much we may find mr. lawrence, we confess, hang in the dusty rear). we shall explain in a moment what we mean by this designation of the element that these best of the younger men strike us as more particularly sharing, our point being provisionally that mr. wells and mr. arnold bennett (speaking now only of them) began some time back to show us, and to show sundry emulous and generous young spirits then in the act of more or less waking up, what the state in question might amount to. we confound the author of “tono-bungay” and the author of “clayhanger” in this imputation for the simple reason that with the sharpest differences of character and range they yet come together under our so convenient measure of value by saturation. this is the greatest value, to our sense, in either of them, their other values, even when at the highest, not being quite in proportion to it; and as to be saturated is to be documented, to be able even on occasion to prove quite enviably and potently so, they are alike in the authority that creates emulation. it little signifies that mr. wells’s documented or saturated state in respect to a particular matter in hand is but one of the faces of his generally informed condition, of his extraordinary mass of gathered and assimilated knowledge, a miscellaneous collection more remarkable surely than any teller of “mere” tales, with the possible exception of balzac, has been able to draw upon, whereas mr. arnold bennett’s corresponding provision affects us as, though singularly copious, special, exclusive and artfully economic. this distinction avails nothing against that happy fact of the handiest possession by mr. wells of immeasurably more concrete material, amenable for straight and vivid reference, convertible into apt illustration, than we should know where to look for other examples of. the author of “the new machiavelli” knows, somehow, to our mystified and dazzled apprehension, because he writes and because that act constitutes for him the need, on occasion a most desperate, of absorbing knowledge at the pores; the chronicler of the five towns writing so much more discernibly, on the other hand, because he knows, and conscious of no need more desperate than that particular circle of civilisation may satisfy.

our argument is that each is ideally immersed in his own body of reference, and that immersion in any such degree and to the effect of any such variety, intensity and plausibility is really among us a new feature of the novelist’s range of resource. we have seen him, we have even seen her, otherwise auspiciously endowed, seen him observant, impassioned, inspired, and in virtue of these things often very charming, very interesting, very triumphant, visibly qualified for the highest distinction before the fact and visibly crowned by the same after it—we have seen him with a great imagination and a great sense of life, we have seen him even with a great sense of expression and a considerable sense of art: so that we have only to reascend the stream of our comparatively recent literature to meet him serene and immortal, brow-bound with the bay and erect on his particular pedestal. we have only to do that, but have only also, while we do it, to recognise that meantime other things still than these various apotheoses have taken place, and that, to the increase of our recreation, and even if our limited space condemns us to put the matter a trifle clumsily, a change has come over our general receptive sensibility not less than over our productive tradition. in these connections, we admit, overstatement is easy and over-emphasis tempting; we confess furthermore to a frank desire to enrich the case, the historic, with all the meaning we can stuff into it. so viewed accordingly it gives us the “new,” to repeat our expression, as an appetite for a closer notation, a sharper specification of the signs of life, of consciousness, of the human scene and the human subject in general, than the three or four generations before us had been at all moved to insist on. they had insisted indeed, these generations, we see as we look back to them, on almost nothing whatever; what was to come to them had come, in enormous affluence and freshness at its best, and to our continued appreciation as well as to the honour of their sweet susceptibility, because again and again the great miracle of genius took place, while they gaped, in their social and sentimental sky. for ourselves that miracle has not been markedly renewed, but it has none the less happened that by hook and by crook the case for appreciation remains interesting. the great thing that saves it, under the drawback we have named, is, no doubt, that we have simply—always for appreciation—learned a little to insist, and that we thus get back on one hand something of what we have lost on the other. we are unable of course, with whatever habit of presumption engendered, to insist upon genius; so that who shall describe the measure of success we still achieve as not virtually the search for freshness, and above all for closeness, in quite a different direction? to this nearer view of commoner things mr. wells, say, and mr. arnold bennett, and in their degree, under the infection communicated, mr. d. h. lawrence and mr. gilbert cannan and mr. compton mackenzie and mr. hugh walpole, strike us as having all gathered themselves up with a movement never yet undertaken on our literary scene, and, beyond anything else, with an instinctive divination of what had most waved their predecessors off it. what had this lion in the path been, we make them out as after a fashion asking themselves, what had it been from far back and straight down through all the victorian time, but the fond superstition that the key of the situation, of each and every situation that could turn up for the novelist, was the sentimental key, which might fit into no door or window opening on closeness or on freshness at all? was it not for all the world as if even the brightest practitioners of the past, those we now distinguish as saved for glory in spite of themselves, had been as sentimental as they could, or, to give the trick another name, as romantic and thereby as shamelessly “dodgy”?—just in order not to be close and fresh, not to be authentic, as that takes trouble, takes talent, and you can be sentimental, you can be romantic, you can be dodgy, alas, not a bit less on the footing of genius than on the footing of mediocrity or even of imbecility? was it not as if the sentimental had been more and more noted as but another name for the romantic, if not indeed the romantic as but another name for the sentimental, and as if these things, whether separate or united, had been in the same degree recognised as unamenable, or at any rate unfavourable, to any consistent fineness of notation, once the tide of the copious as a condition of the thorough had fairly set in?

so, to express it briefly, the possibility of hugging the shore of the real as it had not, among us, been hugged, and of pushing inland, as far as a keel might float, wherever the least opening seemed to smile, dawned upon a few votaries and gathered further confidence with exercise. who could say, of course, that jane austen had not been close, just as who could ask if anthony trollope had not been copious?—just as who could not say that it all depended on what was meant by these terms? the demonstration of what was meant, it presently appeared, could come but little by little, quite as if each tentative adventurer had rather anxiously to learn for himself what might be meant—this failing at least the leap into the arena of some great demonstrative, some sudden athletic and epoch-making authority. who could pretend that dickens was anything but romantic, and even more romantic in his humour, if possible, than in pathos or in queer perfunctory practice of the “plot”? who could pretend that jane austen didn’t leave much more untold than told about the aspects and manners even of the confined circle in which her muse revolved? why shouldn’t it be argued against her that where her testimony complacently ends the pressure of appetite within us presumes exactly to begin? who could pretend that the reality of trollope didn’t owe much of its abundance to the diluted, the quite extravagantly watered strain, no less than to the heavy hand, in which it continued to be ladled out? who of the younger persuasion would not have been ready to cite, as one of the liveliest opportunities for the critic eager to see representation searching, such a claim for the close as thackeray’s sighing and protesting “look-in” at the acquaintance between arthur pendennis and fanny bolton, the daughter of the temple laundress, amid the purlieus of that settlement? the sentimental habit and the spirit of romance, it was unmistakably chargeable, stood out to sea as far as possible the moment the shore appeared to offer the least difficulty to hugging, and the victorian age bristled with perfect occasions for our catching them in the act of this showy retreat. all revolutions have been prepared in spite of their often striking us as sudden, and so it was doubtless that when scarce longer ago than the other day mr. arnold bennett had the fortune to lay his hand on a general scene and a cluster of agents deficient to a peculiar degree in properties that might interfere with a desirable density of illustration—deficient, that is, in such connections as might carry the imagination off to some sport on its own account—we recognised at once a set of conditions auspicious to the newer kind of appeal. let us confess that we were at the same time doubtless to master no better way of describing these conditions than by the remark that they were, for some reason beautifully inherent in them, susceptible at once of being entirely known and of seeming detectably thick. reduction to exploitable knowledge is apt to mean for many a case of the human complexity reduction to comparative thinness; and nothing was thereby at the first blush to interest us more than the fact that the air and the very smell of packed actuality in the subject-matter of such things as the author’s two longest works was clearly but another name for his personal competence in that matter, the fulness and firmness of his embrace of it. this was a fresh and beguiling impression—that the state of inordinate possession on the chronicler’s part, the mere state as such and as an energy directly displayed, was the interest, neither more nor less, was the sense and the meaning and the picture and the drama, all so sufficiently constituting them that it scarce mattered what they were in themselves. of what they were in themselves their being in mr. bennett, as mr. bennett to such a tune harboured them, represented their one conceivable account—not to mention, as reinforcing this, our own great comfort and relief when certain high questions and wonderments about them, or about our mystified relation to them, began one after another to come up.

because such questions did come, we must at once declare, and we are still in presence of them, for all the world as if that case of the perfect harmony, the harmony between subject and author, were just marked with a flaw and didn’t meet the whole assault of restless criticism. what we make out mr. bennett as doing is simply recording his possession or, to put it more completely, his saturation; and to see him as virtually shut up to that process is a note of all the more moment that we see our selected cluster of his interesting juniors, and whether by his direct action on their collective impulse or not, embroiled, as we venture to call it, in the same predicament. the act of squeezing out to the utmost the plump and more or less juicy orange of a particular acquainted state and letting this affirmation of energy, however directed or undirected, constitute for them the “treatment” of a theme—that is what we remark them as mainly engaged in, after remarking the example so strikingly, so originally set, even if an undue subjection to it be here and there repudiated. nothing is further from our thought than to undervalue saturation and possession, the fact of the particular experience, the state and degree of acquaintance incurred, however such a consciousness may have been determined; for these things represent on the part of the novelist, as on the part of any painter of things seen, felt or imagined, just one half of his authority—the other half being represented of course by the application he is inspired to make of them. therefore that fine secured half is so much gained at the start, and the fact of its brightly being there may really by itself project upon the course so much colour and form as to make us on occasion, under the genial force, almost not miss the answer to the question of application. when the author of “clayhanger” has put down upon the table, in dense unconfused array, every fact required, every fact in any way invocable, to make the life of the five towns press upon us, and to make our sense of it, so full-fed, content us, we may very well go on for the time in the captive condition, the beguiled and bemused condition, the acknowledgment of which is in general our highest tribute to the temporary master of our sensibility. nothing at such moments—or rather at the end of them, when the end begins to threaten—may be of a more curious strain than the dawning unrest that suggests to us fairly our first critical comment: “yes, yes—but is this all? these are the circumstances of the interest—we see, we see; but where is the interest itself, where and what is its centre, and how are we to measure it in relation to that?” of course we may in the act of exhaling that plaint (which we have just expressed at its mildest) well remember how many people there are to tell us that to “measure” an interest is none of our affair; that we have but to take it on the cheapest and easiest terms and be thankful; and that if by our very confession we have been led the imaginative dance the music has done for us all it pretends to. which words, however, have only to happen to be for us the most unintelligent conceivable not in the least to arrest our wonderment as to where our bedrenched consciousness may still not awkwardly leave us for the pleasure of appreciation. that appreciation is also a mistake and a priggishness, being reflective and thereby corrosive, is another of the fond dicta which we are here concerned but to brush aside—the more closely to embrace the welcome induction that appreciation, attentive and reflective, inquisitive and conclusive, is in this connection absolutely the golden key to our pleasure. the more it plays up, the more we recognise and are able to number the sources of our enjoyment, the greater the provision made for security in that attitude, which corresponds, by the same stroke, with the reduced danger of waste in the undertaking to amuse us. it all comes back to our amusement, and to the noblest surely, on the whole, we know; and it is in the very nature of clinging appreciation not to sacrifice consentingly a single shade of the art that makes for that blessing. from this solicitude spring our questions, and not least the one to which we give ourselves for the moment here—this moment of our being regaled as never yet with the fruits of the movement (if the name be not of too pompous an application where the flush and the heat of accident too seem so candidly to look forth), in favour of the “expression of life” in terms as loose as may pretend to an effect of expression at all. the relegation of terms to the limbo of delusions outlived so far as ever really cultivated becomes of necessity, it will be plain, the great mark of the faith that for the novelist to show he “knows all about” a certain congeries of aspects, the more numerous within their mixed circle the better, is thereby to set in motion, with due intensity, the pretension to interest. the state of knowing all about whatever it may be has thus only to become consistently and abundantly active to pass for his supreme function; and to its so becoming active few difficulties appear to be descried—so great may on occasion be the mere excitement of activity. to the fact that the exhilaration is, as we have hinted, often infectious, to this and to the charming young good faith and general acclamation under which each case appears to proceed—each case we of course mean really repaying attention—the critical reader owes his opportunity so considerably and so gratefully to generalise.

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we should have only to remount the current with a certain energy to come straight up against tolstoy as the great illustrative master-hand on all this ground of the disconnection of method from matter—which encounter, however, would take us much too far, so that we must for the present but hang off from it with the remark that of all great painters of the social picture it was given that epic genius most to serve admirably as a rash adventurer and a “caution,” and execrably, pestilentially, as a model. in this strange union of relations he stands alone: from no other great projector of the human image and the human idea is so much truth to be extracted under an equal leakage of its value. all the proportions in him are so much the largest that the drop of attention to our nearer cases might by its violence leave little of that principle alive; which fact need not disguise from us, none the less, that as mr. h. g. wells and mr. arnold bennett, to return to them briefly again, derive, by multiplied if diluted transmissions, from the great russian (from whose all but equal companion turgenieff we recognise no derivatives at all), so, observing the distances, we may profitably detect an unexhausted influence in our minor, our still considerably less rounded vessels. highly attaching as indeed the game might be, of inquiring as to the centre of the interest or the sense of the whole in “the passionate friends,” or in “the old wives’ tale,” after having sought those luxuries in vain not only through the general length and breadth of “war and peace,” but within the quite respectable confines of any one of the units of effect there clustered: this as preparing us to address a like friendly challenge to mr. cannan’s “round the corner,” say, or to mr. lawrence’s “sons and lovers”—should we wish to be very friendly to mr. lawrence—or to mr. hugh walpole’s “duchess of wrexe,” or even to mr. compton mackenzie’s “sinister street” and “carnival,” discernibly, we hasten to add, though certain betrayals of a controlling idea and a pointed intention do comparatively gleam out of the two fictions last named. “the old wives’ tale” is the history of two sisters, daughters of a prosperous draper in a staffordshire town, who, separating early in life, through the flight of one of them to paris with an ill-chosen husband and the confirmed and prolonged local pitch of the career of the other, are reunited late in life by the return of the fugitive after much parisian experience and by her pacified acceptance of the conditions of her birthplace. the divided current flows together again, and the chronicle closes with the simple drying up determined by the death of the sisters. that is all; the canvas is covered, ever so closely and vividly covered, by the exhibition of innumerable small facts and aspects, at which we assist with the most comfortable sense of their substantial truth. the sisters, and more particularly the less adventurous, are at home in their author’s mind, they sit and move at their ease in the square chamber of his attention, to a degree beyond which the production of that ideal harmony between creature and creator could scarcely go, and all by an art of demonstration so familiar and so “quiet” that the truth and the poetry, to use goethe’s distinction, melt utterly together and we see no difference between the subject of the show and the showman’s feeling, let alone the showman’s manner, about it. this felt identity of the elements—because we at least consciously feel—becomes in the novel we refer to, and not less in “clayhanger,” which our words equally describe, a source for us of abject confidence, confidence truly so abject in the solidity of every appearance that it may be said to represent our whole relation to the work and completely to exhaust our reaction upon it. “clayhanger,” of the two fictions even the more densely loaded with all the evidence in what we should call the case presented did we but learn meanwhile for what case, or for a case of what, to take it, inscribes the annals, the private more particularly, of a provincial printer in a considerable way of business, beginning with his early boyhood and going on to the complications of his maturity—these not exhausted with our present possession of the record, inasmuch as by the author’s announcement there is more of the catalogue to come. this most monumental of mr. arnold bennett’s recitals, taking it with its supplement of “hilda lessways,” already before us, is so describable through its being a monument exactly not to an idea, a pursued and captured meaning, or in short to anything whatever, but just simply of the quarried and gathered material it happens to contain, the stones and bricks and rubble and cement and promiscuous constituents of every sort that have been heaped in it and thanks to which it quite massively piles itself up. our perusal and our enjoyment are our watching of the growth of the pile and of the capacity, industry, energy with which the operation is directed. a huge and in its way a varied aggregation, without traceable lines, divinable direction, effect of composition, the mere number of its pieces, the great dump of its material, together with the fact that here and there in the miscellany, as with the value of bits of marble or porphyry, fine elements shine out, it keeps us standing and waiting to the end—and largely just because it keeps us wondering. we surely wonder more what it may all propose to mean than any equal appearance of preparation to relieve us of that strain, any so founded and grounded a postponement of the disclosure of a sense in store, has for a long time called upon us to do in a like connection. a great thing it is assuredly that while we wait and wonder we are amused—were it not for that, truly, our situation would be thankless enough; we may ask ourselves, as has already been noted, why on such ambiguous terms we should consent to be, and why the practice doesn’t at a given moment break down; and our answer brings us back to that many-fingered grasp of the orange that the author squeezes. this particular orange is of the largest and most rotund, and his trust in the consequent flow is of its nature communicative. such is the case always, and most naturally, with that air in a person who has something, who at the very least has much to tell us: we like so to be affected by it, we meet it half way and lend ourselves, sinking in up to the chin. up to the chin only indeed, beyond doubt; we even then feel our head emerge, for judgment and articulate question, and it is from that position that we remind ourselves how the real reward of our patience is still to come—the reward attending not at all the immediate sense of immersion, but reserved for the after-sense, which is a very different matter, whether in the form of a glow or of a chill.

if mr. bennett’s tight rotundity then is of the handsomest size and his manipulation of it so firm, what are we to say of mr. wells’s, who, a novelist very much as lord bacon was a philosopher, affects us as taking all knowledge for his province and as inspiring in us to the very highest degree the confidence enjoyed by himself—enjoyed, we feel, with a breadth with which it has been given no one of his fellow-craftsmen to enjoy anything. if confidence alone could lead utterly captive we should all be huddled in a bunch at mr. wells’s heels—which is indeed where we are abjectly gathered so far as that force does operate. it is literally mr. wells’s own mind, and the experience of his own mind, incessant and extraordinarily various, extraordinarily reflective, even with all sorts of conditions made, of whatever he may expose it to, that forms the reservoir tapped by him, that constitutes his provision of grounds of interest. it is, by our thinking, in his power to name to us, as a preliminary, more of these grounds than all his contemporaries put together, and even to exceed any competitor, without exception, in the way of suggesting that, thick as he may seem to lay them, they remain yet only contributive, are not in themselves full expression but are designed strictly to subserve it, that this extraordinary writer’s spell resides. when full expression, the expression of some particular truth, seemed to lapse in this or that of his earlier novels (we speak not here of his shorter things, for the most part delightfully wanton and exempt,) it was but by a hand’s breadth, so that if we didn’t inveterately quite know what he intended we yet always felt sufficiently that he knew. the particular intentions of such matters as “kipps,” as “tono-bungay,” as “ann veronica,” so swarmed about us, in their blinding, bluffing vivacity, that the mere sum of them might have been taken for a sense over and above which it was graceless to inquire. the more this author learns and learns, or at any rate knows and knows, however, the greater is this impression of his holding it good enough for us, such as we are, that he shall but turn out his mind and its contents upon us by any free familiar gesture and as from a high window forever open—an entertainment as copious surely as any occasion should demand, at least till we have more intelligibly expressed our title to a better. such things as “the new machiavelli,” “marriage,” “the passionate friends,” are so very much more attestations of the presence of material than attestations of an interest in the use of it that we ask ourselves again and again why so fondly neglected a state of leakage comes not to be fatal to any provision of quantity, or even to stores more specially selected for the ordeal than mr. wells’s always strike us as being. is not the pang of witnessed waste in fact great just in proportion as we are touched by our author’s fine off-handedness as to the value of the stores, about which he can for the time make us believe what he will? so that, to take an example susceptible of brief statement, we wince at a certain quite peculiarly gratuitous sacrifice to the casual in “marriage” very much as at seeing some fine and indispensable little part of a mechanism slip through profane fingers and lose itself. who does not remember what ensues after a little upon the aviational descent of the hero of the fiction just named into the garden occupied, in company with her parents, by the young lady with whom he is to fall in love?—and this even though the whole opening scene so constituted, with all the comedy hares its function appears to be to start, remains with its back squarely turned, esthetically speaking, to the quarter in which the picture develops. the point for our mortification is that by one of the first steps in this development, the first impression on him having been made, the hero accidentally meets the heroine, of a summer eventide, in a leafy lane which supplies them with the happiest occasion to pursue their acquaintance—or in other words supplies the author with the liveliest consciousness (as we at least feel it should have been) that just so the relation between the pair, its seed already sown and the fact of that bringing about all that is still to come, pushes aside whatever veil and steps forth into life. to show it step forth and affirm itself as a relation, what is this but the interesting function of the whole passage, on the performance of which what follows is to hang?—and yet who can say that when the ostensible sequence is presented, and our young lady, encountered again by her stirred swain, under cover of night, in a favouring wood, is at once encompassed by his arms and pressed to his lips and heart (for celebration thus of their third meeting) we do not assist at a well-nigh heartbreaking miscarriage of “effect”? we see effect, invoked in vain, simply stand off unconcerned; effect not having been at all consulted in advance she is not to be secured on such terms. and her presence would so have redounded—perfectly punctual creature as she is on a made appointment and a clear understanding—to the advantage of all concerned. the bearing of the young man’s act is all in our having begun to conceive it as possible, begun even to desire it, in the light of what has preceded; therefore if the participants have not been shown us as on the way to it, nor the question of it made beautifully to tremble for us in the air, its happiest connections fail and we but stare at it mystified. the instance is undoubtedly trifling, but in the infinite complex of such things resides for a work of art the shy virtue, shy at least till wooed forth, of the whole susceptibility. the case of mr. wells might take us much further—such remarks as there would be to make, say, on such a question as the due understanding, on the part of “the passionate friends” (not as associated persons but as a composed picture), of what that composition is specifically about and where, for treatment of this interest, it undertakes to find its centre: all of which, we are willing however to grant, falls away before the large assurance and incorrigible levity with which this adventurer carries his lapses—far more of an adventurer as he is than any other of the company. the composition, as we have called it, heaven saving the mark, is simply at any and every moment “about” mr. wells’s general adventure; which is quite enough while it preserves, as we trust it will long continue to do, its present robust pitch.

we have already noted that “round the corner,” mr. gilbert cannan’s liveliest appeal to our attention, belongs to the order of constatations pure and simple; to the degree that as a document of that nature and of that rigour the book could perhaps not more completely affirm itself. when we have said that it puts on record the “tone,” the manners, the general domestic proceedings and train de vie of an amiable clergyman’s family established in one of the more sordid quarters of a big black northern city of the liverpool or manchester complexion we have advanced as far in the way of descriptive statement as the interesting work seems to warrant. for it is interesting, in spite of its leaving itself on our hands with a consistent indifference to any question of the charmed application springing from it all that places it in the forefront of its type. again as under the effect of mr. bennett’s major productions our sole inference is that things, the things disclosed, go on and on, in any given case, in spite of everything—with mr. cannan’s one discernible care perhaps being for how extraordinarily much, in the particular example here before him, they were able to go on in spite of. the conception, the presentation of this enormous inauspicious amount as bearing upon the collective career of the folyats is, we think, as near as the author comes at any point to betraying an awareness of a subject. yet again, though so little encouraged or “backed,” a subject after a fashion makes itself, even as it has made itself in “the old wives’ tale” and in “clayhanger,” in “sons and lovers,” where, as we have hinted, any assistance rendered us for a view of one most comfortably enjoys its absence, and in mr. hugh walpole’s newest novel, where we wander scarcely less with our hand in no guiding grasp, but where the author’s good disposition, as we feel it, to provide us with what we lack if he only knew how, constitutes in itself such a pleading liberality. we seem to see him in this spirit lay again and again a flowered carpet for our steps. if we do not include mr. compton mackenzie to the same extent in our generalisation it is really because we note a difference in him, a difference in favour of his care for the application. preoccupations seem at work in “sinister street,” and withal in “carnival,” the brush of which we in other quarters scarce even suspect and at some of which it will presently be of profit to glance. “i answer for it, you know,” we seem at any rate to hear mr. gilbert cannan say with an admirably genuine young pessimism, “i answer for it that they were really like that, odd or unpleasant or uncontributive, and therefore tiresome, as it may strike you;” and the charm of mr. cannan, so far as up or down the rank we so disengage a charm, is that we take him at his word. his guarantee, his straight communication, of his general truth is a value, and values are rare—the flood of fiction is apparently capable of running hundreds of miles without a single glint of one—and thus in default of satisfaction we get stopgaps and are thankful often under a genial touch to get even so much. the value indeed is crude, it would be quadrupled were it only wrought and shaped; yet it has still the rude dignity that it counts to us for experience or at least for what we call under our present pitch of sensibility force of impression. the experience, we feel, is ever something to conclude upon, while the impression is content to wait; to wait, say, in the spirit in which we must accept this younger bustle if we accept it at all, the spirit of its serving as a rather presumptuous lesson to us in patience. while we wait, again, we are amused—not in the least, also to repeat, up to the notch of our conception of amusement, which draws upon still other forms and sources; but none the less for the wonder, the intensity, the actuality, the probity of the vision. this is much as in “clayhanger” and in “hilda lessways,” where, independently of the effect, so considerably rendered, of the long lapse of time, always in this type of recital a source of amusement in itself, and certainly of the noblest, we get such an admirably substantial thing as the collective image of the orgreaves, the local family in whose ample lap the amenities and the humanities so easily sit, for mr. bennett’s evocation and his protagonist’s recognition, and the manner of the presentation of whom, with the function and relation of the picture at large, strikes such a note of felicity, achieves such a simulation of sense, as the author should never again be excused for treating, that is for neglecting, as beyond his range. here figures signally the interesting case of a compositional function absolutely performed by mere multiplication, the flow of the facts: the orgreaves, in “clayhanger,” are there, by what we make out, but for “life,” for general life only, and yet, with their office under any general or inferential meaning entirely unmarked, come doubtless as near squaring esthetically with the famous formula of the “slice of life” as any example that could be adduced; happening moreover as they probably do to owe this distinction to their coincidence at once with reality and charm—a fact esthetically curious and delightful. for we attribute the bold stroke they represent much more to mr. arnold bennett’s esthetic instinct than to anything like a calculation of his bearings, and more to his thoroughly acquainted state, as we may again put it, than to all other causes together: which strikingly enough shows how much complexity of interest may be simulated by mere presentation of material, mere squeezing of the orange, when the material happens to be “handsome” or the orange to be sweet.

iii

the orange of our persistent simile is in mr. hugh walpole’s hands very remarkably sweet—a quality we recognise in it even while reduced to observing that the squeeze pure and simple, the fond, the lingering, the reiterated squeeze, constitutes as yet his main perception of method. he enjoys in a high degree the consciousness of saturation, and is on such serene and happy terms with it as almost make of critical interference, in so bright an air, an assault on personal felicity. full of material is thus the author of “the duchess of wrexe,” and of a material which we should describe as the consciousness of youth were we not rather disposed to call it a peculiar strain of the extreme unconsciousness. mr. walpole offers us indeed a rare and interesting case—we see about the field none other like it; the case of a positive identity between the spirit, not to say the time of life or stage of experience, of the aspiring artist and the field itself of his vision. “the duchess of wrexe” reeks with youth and the love of youth and the confidence of youth—youth taking on with a charming exuberance the fondest costume or disguise, that of an adventurous and voracious felt interest, interest in life, in london, in society, in character, in portland place, in the oxford circus, in the afternoon tea-table, in the torrid weather, in fifty other immediate things as to which its passion and its curiosity are of the sincerest. the wonderful thing is that these latter forces operate, in their way, without yet being disengaged and hand-free—disengaged, that is, from their state of being young, with its billowy mufflings and other soft obstructions, the state of being present, being involved and aware, close “up against” the whole mass of possibilities, being in short intoxicated with the mixed liquors of suggestion. in the fumes of this acute situation mr. walpole’s subject-matter is bathed; the situation being all the while so much more his own and that of a juvenility reacting, in the presence of everything, “for all it is worth,” than the devised and imagined one, however he may circle about some such cluster, that every cupful of his excited flow tastes three times as much of his temperamental freshness as it tastes of this, that or the other character or substance, above all of this, that or the other group of antecedents and references, supposed to be reflected in it. all of which does not mean, we hasten to add, that the author of “the duchess of wrexe” has not the gift of life; but only that he strikes us as having received it, straight from nature, with such a concussion as to have kept the boon at the stage of violence—so that, fairly pinned down by it, he is still embarrassed for passing it on. on the day he shall have worked free of this primitive predicament, the crude fact of the convulsion itself, there need be no doubt of his exhibiting matter into which method may learn how to bite. the tract meanwhile affects us as more or less virgin snow, and we look with interest and suspense for the imprint of a process.

if those remarks represent all the while, further, that the performances we have glanced at, with others besides, lead our attention on, we hear ourselves the more naturally asked what it is then that we expect or want, confessing as we do that we have been in a manner interested, even though, from case to case, in a varying degree, and that thackeray, turgenieff, balzac, dickens, anatole france, no matter who, can not do more than interest. let us therefore concede to the last point that small mercies are better than none, that there are latent within the critic numberless liabilities to being “squared” (the extent to which he may on occasion betray his price!) and so great a preference for being pleased over not being, that you may again and again see him assist with avidity at the attempt of the slice of life to butter itself thick. its explanation that it is a slice of life and pretends to be nothing else figures for us, say, while we watch, the jam super-added to the butter. for since the jam, on this system, descends upon our desert, in its form of manna, from quite another heaven than the heaven of method, the mere demonstration of its agreeable presence is alone sufficient to hint at our more than one chance of being supernaturally fed. the happy-go-lucky fashion of it is indeed not then, we grant, an objection so long as we do take in refreshment: the meal may be of the last informality and yet produce in the event no small sense of repletion. the slice of life devoured, the butter and the jam duly appreciated, we are ready, no doubt, on another day, to trust ourselves afresh to the desert. we break camp, that is, and face toward a further stretch of it, all in the faith that we shall be once more provided for. we take the risk, we enjoy more or less the assistance—more or less, we put it, for the vision of a possible arrest of the miracle or failure of our supply never wholly leaves us. the phenomenon is too uncanny, the happy-go-lucky, as we know it in general, never has been trustable to the end; the absence of the last true touch in the preparation of its viands becomes with each renewal of the adventure a more sensible fact. by the last true touch we mean of course the touch of the hand of selection; the principle of selection having been involved at the worst or the least, one would suppose, in any approach whatever to the loaf of life with the arrière-pensée of a slice. there being no question of a slice upon which the further question of where and how to cut it does not wait, the office of method, the idea of choice and comparison, have occupied the ground from the first. this makes clear, to a moment’s reflection, that there can be no such thing as an amorphous slice, and that any waving aside of inquiry as to the sense and value of a chunk of matter has to reckon with the simple truth of its having been born of naught else but measured excision. reasons have been the fairies waiting on its cradle, the possible presence of a bad fairy in the form of a bad reason to the contrary notwithstanding. it has thus had connections at the very first stage of its detachment that are at no later stage logically to be repudiated; let it lie as lumpish as it will—for adoption, we mean, of the ideal of the lump—it has been tainted from too far back with the hard liability to form, and thus carries in its very breast the hapless contradiction of its sturdy claim to have none. this claim has the inevitable challenge at once to meet. how can a slice of life be anything but illustrational of the loaf, and how can illustration not immediately bristle with every sign of the extracted and related state? the relation is at once to what the thing comes from and to what it waits upon—which last is our act of recognition. we accordingly appreciate it in proportion as it so accounts for itself; the quantity and the intensity of its reference are the measure of our knowledge of it. this is exactly why illustration breaks down when reference, otherwise application, runs short, and why before any assemblage of figures or aspects, otherwise of samples and specimens, the question of what these are, extensively, samples and specimens of declines not to beset us—why, otherwise again, we look ever for the supreme reference that shall avert the bankruptcy of sense.

let us profess all readiness to repeat that we may still have had, on the merest “life” system, or that of the starkest crudity of the slice, all the entertainment that can come from watching a wayfarer engage with assurance in an alley that we know to have no issue—and from watching for the very sake of the face that he may show us on reappearing at its mouth. the recitals of mr. arnold bennett, mr. gilbert cannan, mr. d. h. lawrence, fairly smell of the real, just as the “fortitude” and “the duchess” of mr. hugh walpole smell of the romantic; we have sufficiently noted then that, once on the scent, we are capable of pushing ahead. how far it is at the same time from being all a matter of smell the terms in which we just above glanced at the weakness of the spell of the happy-go-lucky may here serve to indicate. there faces us all the while the fact that the act of consideration as an incident of the esthetic pleasure, consideration confidently knowing us to have sooner or later to arrive at it, may be again and again postponed, but can never hope not some time to fall due. consideration is susceptible of many forms, some one or other of which no conscious esthetic effort fails to cry out for; and the simplest description of the cry of the novel when sincere—for have we not heard such compositions bluff us, as it were, with false cries?—is as an appeal to us when we have read it once to read it yet again. that is the act of consideration; no other process of considering approaches this for directness, so that anything short of it is virtually not to consider at all. the word has sometimes another sense, that of the appeal to us not, for the world, to go back—this being of course consideration of a sort; the sort clearly that the truly flushed production should be the last to invoke. the effect of consideration, we need scarce remark, is to light for us in a work of art the hundred questions of how and why and whither, and the effect of these questions, once lighted, is enormously to thicken and complicate, even if toward final clarifications, what we have called the amused state produced in us by the work. the more our amusement multiplies its terms the more fond and the more rewarded consideration becomes; the fewer it leaves them, on the other hand, the less to be resisted for us is the impression of “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” birds that have appeared to sing, or whose silence we have not heeded, on a first perusal, prove on a second to have no note to contribute, and whether or no a second is enough to admonish us of those we miss, we mostly expect much from it in the way of emphasis of those we find. then it is that notes of intention become more present or more absent; then it is that we take the measure of what we have already called our effective provision. the bravest providers and designers show at this point something still in store which only the second rummage was appointed to draw forth. to the variety of these ways of not letting our fondness fast is there not practically no limit?—and of the arts, the devices, the graces, the subtle secrets applicable to such an end what presumptuous critic shall pretend to draw the list? let him for the moment content himself with saying that many of the most effective are mysteries, precisely, of method, or that even when they are not most essentially and directly so it takes method, blest method, to extract their soul and to determine their action.

it is odd and delightful perhaps that at the very moment of our urging this truth we should happen to be regaled with a really supreme specimen of the part playable in a novel by the source of interest, the principle of provision attended to, for which we claim importance. mr. joseph conrad’s “chance” is none the less a signal instance of provision the most earnest and the most copious for its leaving ever so much to be said about the particular provision effected. it is none the less an extraordinary exhibition of method by the fact that the method is, we venture to say, without a precedent in any like work. it places mr. conrad absolutely alone as a votary of the way to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing. the way to do it that shall make it undergo least is the line on which we are mostly now used to see prizes carried off; so that the author of “chance” gathers up on this showing all sorts of comparative distinction. he gathers up at least two sorts—that of bravery in absolutely reversing the process most accredited, and that, quite separate, we make out, of performing the man?uvre under salvos of recognition. it is not in these days often given to a refinement of design to be recognised, but mr. conrad has made his achieve that miracle—save in so far indeed as the miracle has been one thing and the success another. the miracle is of the rarest, confounding all calculation and suggesting more reflections than we can begin to make place for here; but the sources of surprise surrounding it might be, were this possible, even greater and yet leave the fact itself in all independence, the fact that the whole undertaking was committed by its very first step either to be “art” exclusively or to be nothing. this is the prodigious rarity, since surely we have known for many a day no other such case of the whole clutch of eggs, and these withal of the freshest, in that one basket; to which it may be added that if we say for many a day this is not through our readiness positively to associate the sight with any very definite moment of the past. what concerns us is that the general effect of “chance” is arrived at by a pursuance of means to the end in view contrasted with which every other current form of the chase can only affect us as cheap and futile; the carriage of the burden or amount of service required on these lines exceeding surely all other such displayed degrees of energy put together. nothing could well interest us more than to see the exemplary value of attention, attention given by the author and asked of the reader, attested in a case in which it has had almost unspeakable difficulties to struggle with—since so we are moved to qualify the particular difficulty mr. conrad has “elected” to face: the claim for method in itself, method in this very sense of attention applied, would be somehow less lighted if the difficulties struck us as less consciously, or call it even less wantonly, invoked. what they consist of we should have to diverge here a little to say, and should even then probably but lose ourselves in the dim question of why so special, eccentric and desperate a course, so deliberate a plunge into threatened frustration, should alone have seemed open. it has been the course, so far as three words may here serve, of his so multiplying his creators or, as we are now fond of saying, producers, as to make them almost more numerous and quite emphatically more material than the creatures and the production itself in whom and which we by the general law of fiction expect such agents to lose themselves. we take for granted by the general law of fiction a primary author, take him so much for granted that we forget him in proportion as he works upon us, and that he works upon us most in fact by making us forget him.

mr. conrad’s first care on the other hand is expressly to posit or set up a reciter, a definite responsible intervening first person singular, possessed of infinite sources of reference, who immediately proceeds to set up another, to the end that this other may conform again to the practice, and that even at that point the bridge over to the creature, or in other words to the situation or the subject, the thing “produced,” shall, if the fancy takes it, once more and yet once more glory in a gap. it is easy to see how heroic the undertaking of an effective fusion becomes on these terms, fusion between what we are to know and that prodigy of our knowing which is ever half the very beauty of the atmosphere of authenticity; from the moment the reporters are thus multiplied from pitch to pitch the tone of each, especially as “rendered” by his precursor in the series, becomes for the prime poet of all an immense question—these circumferential tones having not only to be such individually separate notes, but to keep so clear of the others, the central, the numerous and various voices of the agents proper, those expressive of the action itself and in whom the objectivity resides. we usually escape the worst of this difficulty of a tone about the tone of our characters, our projected performers, by keeping it single, keeping it “down” and thereby comparatively impersonal or, as we may say, inscrutable; which is what a creative force, in its blest fatuity, likes to be. but the omniscience, remaining indeed nameless, though constantly active, which sets marlow’s omniscience in motion from the very first page, insisting on a reciprocity with it throughout, this original omniscience invites consideration of itself only in a degree less than that in which marlow’s own invites it; and marlow’s own is a prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground of the case exposed. we make out this ground but through the shadow cast by the flight, clarify it though the real author visibly reminds himself again and again that he must—all the more that, as if by some tremendous forecast of future applied science, the upper aeroplane causes another, as we have said, to depend from it and that one still another; these dropping shadow after shadow, to the no small menace of intrinsic colour and form and whatever, upon the passive expanse. what shall we most call mr. conrad’s method accordingly but his attempt to clarify quand même—ridden as he has been, we perceive at the end of fifty pages of “chance,” by such a danger of steeping his matter in perfect eventual obscuration as we recall no other artist’s consenting to with an equal grace. this grace, which presently comes over us as the sign of the whole business, is mr. conrad’s gallantry itself, and the shortest account of the rest of the connection for our present purpose is that his gallantry is thus his success. it literally strikes us that his volume sets in motion more than anything else a drama in which his own system and his combined eccentricities of recital represent the protagonist in face of powers leagued against it, and of which the dénouement gives us the system fighting in triumph, though with its back desperately to the wall, and laying the powers piled up at its feet. this frankly has been our spectacle, our suspense and our thrill; with the one flaw on the roundness of it all the fact that the predicament was not imposed rather than invoked, was not the effect of a challenge from without, but that of a mystic impulse from within.

of an exquisite refinement at all events are the critical questions opened up in the attempt, the question in particular of by what it exactly is that the experiment is crowned. pronouncing it crowned and the case saved by sheer gallantry, as we did above, is perhaps to fall just short of the conclusion we might reach were we to push further. “chance” is an example of objectivity, most precious of aims, not only menaced but definitely compromised; whereby we are in presence of something really of the strangest, a general and diffused lapse of authenticity which an inordinate number of common readers—since it always takes this and these to account encouragingly for “editions”—have not only condoned but have emphatically commended. they can have done this but through the bribe of some authenticity other in kind, no doubt, and seeming to them equally great if not greater, which gives back by the left hand what the right has, with however dissimulated a grace, taken away. what mr. conrad’s left hand gives back then is simply mr. conrad himself. we asked above what would become, by such a form of practice, of indispensable “fusion” or, to call it by another name, of the fine process by which our impatient material, at a given moment, shakes off the humiliation of the handled, the fumbled state, puts its head in the air and, to its own beautiful illusory consciousness at least, simply runs its race. such an amount of handling and fumbling and repointing has it, on the system of the multiplied “putter into marble,” to shake off! and yet behold, the sense of discomfort, as the show here works out, has been conjured away. the fusion has taken place, or at any rate a fusion; only it has been transferred in wondrous fashion to an unexpected, and on the whole more limited plane of operation; it has succeeded in getting effected, so to speak, not on the ground but in the air, not between our writer’s idea and his machinery, but between the different parts of his genius itself. his genius is what is left over from the other, the compromised and compromising quantities—the marlows and their determinant inventors and interlocutors, the powells, the franklins, the fynes, the tell-tale little dogs, the successive members of a cue from one to the other of which the sense and the interest of the subject have to be passed on together, in the manner of the buckets of water for the improvised extinction of a fire, before reaching our apprehension: all with whatever result, to this apprehension, of a quantity to be allowed for as spilt by the way. the residuum has accordingly the form not of such and such a number of images discharged and ordered, but that rather of a wandering, circling, yearning imaginative faculty, encountered in its habit as it lives and diffusing itself as a presence or a tide, a noble sociability of vision. so we have as the force that fills the cup just the high-water mark of a beautiful and generous mind at play in conditions comparatively thankless—thoroughly, unweariedly, yet at the same time ever so elegantly at play, and doing more for itself than it succeeds in getting done for it. than which nothing could be of a greater reward to critical curiosity were it not still for the wonder of wonders, a new page in the record altogether—the fact that these things are apparently what the common reader has seen and understood. great then would seem to be after all the common reader!

iv

we must not fail of the point, however, that we have made these remarks not at all with an eye to the question of whether “chance” has been well or ill inspired as to its particular choice of a way of really attending to itself among all the possible alternatives, but only on the ground of its having compared, selected and held on; since any alternative that might have been preferred and that should have been effectively adopted would point our moral as well—and this even if it is of profit none the less to note the most striking of mr. conrad’s compositional consequences. there is one of these that has had most to do with making his pages differ in texture, and to our very first glance, from that straggle of ungoverned verbiage which leads us up and down those of his fellow fabulists in general on a vain hunt for some projected mass of truth, some solidity of substance, as to which the deluge of “dialogue,” the flooding report of things said, or at least of words pretendedly spoken, shall have learned the art of being merely illustrational. what first springs from any form of real attention, no matter which, we on a comparison so made quickly perceive to be a practical challenge of the preposterous pretension of this most fatuous of the luxuries of looseness to acquit itself with authority of the structural and compositional office. infinitely valid and vivid as illustration, it altogether depends for dignity and sense upon our state of possession of its historic preliminaries, its promoting conditions, its supporting ground; that is upon our waiting occupancy of the chamber it proposes to light and which, when no other source of effect is more indicated, it doubtless inimitably fills with life. then its relation to what encloses and confines and, in its sovereign interest, finely compresses it, offering it constituted aspects, surfaces, presences, faces and figures of the matter we are either generally or acutely concerned with to play over and hang upon, then this relation gives it all its value: it has flowered from the soil prepared and sheds back its richness into the field of cultivation. it is interesting, in a word, only when nothing else is equally so, carrying the vessel of the interest with least of a stumble or a sacrifice; but it is of the essence that the sounds so set in motion (it being as sound above all that they undertake to convey sense,) should have something to proceed from, in their course, to address themselves to and be affected by, with all the sensibility of sounds. it is of the essence that they should live in a medium, and in a medium only, since it takes a medium to give them an identity, the intenser the better, and that the medium should subserve them by enjoying in a like degree the luxury of an existence. we need of course scarce expressly note that the play, as distinguished from the novel, lives exclusively on the spoken word—not on the report of the thing said but, directly and audibly, on that very thing; that it thrives by its law on the exercise under which the novel hopelessly collapses when the attempt is made disproportionately to impose it. there is no danger for the play of the cart before the horse, no disaster involved in it; that form being all horse and the interest itself mounted and astride, and not, as that of the novel, dependent in the first instance on wheels. the order in which the drama simply says things gives it all its form, while the story told and the picture painted, as the novel at the pass we have brought it to embraces them, reports of an infinite diversity of matters, gathers together and gives out again a hundred sorts, and finds its order and its structure, its unity and its beauty, in the alternation of parts and the adjustment of differences. it is no less apparent that the novel may be fundamentally organised—such things as “the egoist” and “the awkward age” are there to prove it; but in this case it adheres unconfusedly to that logic and has nothing to say to any other. were it not for a second exception, one at this season rather pertinent, “chance” then, to return to it a moment, would be as happy an example as we might just now put our hand on of the automatic working of a scheme unfavourable to that treatment of the colloquy by endless dangling strings which makes the current “story” in general so figure to us a porcupine of extravagant yet abnormally relaxed bristles.

the exception we speak of would be mrs. wharton’s “custom of the country,” in which, as in this lady’s other fictions, we recognise the happy fact of an abuse of no one of the resources it enjoys at the expense of the others; the whole series offering as general an example of dialogue flowering and not weeding, illustrational and not itself starved of illustration, or starved of referability and association, which is the same thing, as meets the eye in any glance that leaves mr. wells at mr. wells’s best-inspired hour out of our own account. the truth is, however, that mrs. wharton is herself here out of our account, even as we have easily recognised mr. galsworthy and mr. maurice hewlett to be; these three authors, with whatever differences between them, remaining essentially votaries of selection and intention and being embodiments thereby, in each case, of some state over and above that simple state of possession of much evidence, that confused conception of what the “slice” of life must consist of, which forms the text of our remarks. mrs. wharton, her conception of the “slice” so clarified and cultivated, would herself of course form a text in quite another connection, as mr. hewlett and mr. galsworthy would do each in his own, which we abstain from specifying; but there are two or three grounds on which the author of “ethan frome,” “the valley of decision” and “the house of mirth,” whom we brush by with reluctance, would point the moral of the treasure of amusement sitting in the lap of method with a felicity peculiarly her own. if one of these is that she too has clearly a saturation—which it would be ever so interesting to determine and appreciate—we have it from her not in the crude state but in the extract, the extract that makes all the difference for our sense of an artistic economy. if the extract, as would appear, is the result of an artistic economy, as the latter is its logical motive, so we find it associated in mrs. wharton with such appeals to our interest, for instance, as the fact that, absolutely sole among our students of this form, she suffers, she even encourages, her expression to flower into some sharp image or figure of her thought when that will make the thought more finely touch us. her step, without straying, encounters the living analogy, which she gathers, in passing, without awkwardness of pause, and which the page then carries on its breast as a trophy plucked by a happy adventurous dash, a token of spirit and temper as well as a proof of vision. we note it as one of the kinds of proof of vision that most fail us in that comparative desert of the inselective where our imagination has itself to hunt out or call down (often among strange witnessed flounderings or sand-storms) such analogies as may mercifully “put” the thing. mrs. wharton not only owes to her cultivated art of putting it the distinction enjoyed when some ideal of expression has the whole of the case, the case once made its concern, in charge, but might further act for us, were we to follow up her exhibition, as lighting not a little that question of “tone,” the author’s own intrinsic, as to which we have just seen mr. conrad’s late production rather tend to darken counsel. “the custom of the country” is an eminent instance of the sort of tonic value most opposed to that baffled relation between the subject-matter and its emergence which we find constituted by the circumvalations of “chance.” mrs. wharton’s reaction in presence of the aspects of life hitherto, it would seem, mainly exposed to her is for the most part the ironic—to which we gather that these particular aspects have so much ministered that, were we to pursue the quest, we might recognise in them precisely the saturation as to which we a moment ago reserved our judgment. “the custom of the country” is at any rate consistently, almost scientifically satiric, as indeed the satiric light was doubtless the only one in which the elements engaged could at all be focussed together. but this happens directly to the profit of something that, as we read, becomes more and more one with the principle of authority at work; the light that gathers is a dry light, of great intensity, and the effect, if not rather the very essence, of its dryness is a particular fine asperity. the usual “creative” conditions and associations, as we have elsewhere languished among them, are thanks to this ever so sensibly altered; the general authoritative relation attested becomes clear—we move in an air purged at a stroke of the old sentimental and romantic values, the perversions with the maximum of waste of perversions, and we shall not here attempt to state what this makes for in the way of esthetic refreshment and relief; the waste having kept us so dangling on the dark esthetic abyss. a shade of asperity may be in such fashion a security against waste, and in the dearth of displayed securities we should welcome it on that ground alone. it helps at any rate to constitute for the talent manifest in “the custom” a rare identity, so far should we have to go to seek another instance of the dry, or call it perhaps even the hard, intellectual touch in the soft, or call it perhaps even the humid, temperamental air; in other words of the masculine conclusion tending so to crown the feminine observation.

if we mentioned mr. compton mackenzie at the beginning of these reflections only to leave him waiting for some further appreciation, this is exactly because his case, to the most interesting effect, is no simple one, like two or three of our others, but on the contrary mystifying enough almost to stand by itself. what would be this striking young writer’s state of acquaintance and possession, and should we find it, on our recognition of it, to be all he is content to pitch forth, without discriminations or determinants, without motives or lights? do “carnival” and “sinister street” proceed from the theory of the slice or from the conception of the extract, “the extract flasked and fine,” the chemical process superseding the mechanical? mr. compton mackenzie’s literary aspect, though decidedly that of youth, or that of experience, a great deal of young experience, in its freshness, offers the attraction of a complexity defiant of the prompt conclusion, really charms us by giving us something to wonder about. we literally find it not easy to say if there may not lurk in “carnival,” for example, a selective sense more apprehensible, to a push of inquiry, than its overflooded surface, a real invitation to wade and upon which everything within the author’s ken appears poured out, would at first lead us to suspect. the question comes up in like fashion as to the distinctly more developed successor of that work, before which we in fact find questions multiply to a positive quickening of critical pleasure. we ask ourselves what “sinister street” may mean as a whole in spite of our sense of being brushed from the first by a hundred subordinate purposes, the succession and alternation of which seem to make after a fashion a plan, and which, though full of occasional design, yet fail to gather themselves for application or to converge to an idea. any idea will serve, ever, that has held up its candle to composition—and it is perhaps because composition proposes itself under mr. compton mackenzie’s energy on a scale well-nigh of the most prodigious that we must wait to see whither it tends. the question of what he may here mean “on the whole,” as we just said, is doubtless admonished to stand back till we be possessed of the whole. this interesting volume is but a first, committed up to its eyes to continuity and with an announced sequel to follow. the recital exhibits at the point we have reached the intimate experience of a boy at school and in his holidays, the amplification of which is to come with his terms and their breaks at a university; and the record will probably form a more squared and extended picture of life equally conditioned by the extremity of youth than we shall know where else to look for. youth clearly has been mr. mackenzie’s saturation, as it has been mr. hugh walpole’s, but we see this not as a subject (youth in itself is no specific subject, any more than age is,) but as matter for a subject and as requiring a motive to redeem it from the merely passive state of the slice. we are sure throughout both “sinister street” and “carnival” of breathing the air of the extract, as we contentiously call it, only in certain of the rounded episodes strung on the loose cord as so many vivid beads, each of its chosen hue, and the series of which, even with differences of price between them, we take for a lively gage of performance to come. these episodes would be easy to cite; they are handsomely numerous and each strikes us as giving in its turn great salience to its motive; besides which each is in its turn “done” with an eminent sense and a remarkably straight hand for doing. they may well be cited together as both signally and finely symptomatic, for the literary gesture and the bravura breadth with which such frequent medallions as the adventure on the boy’s part of the catholic church at bournemouth, as his experiment of the benedictine house in wiltshire, as his period of acquaintance with the esthetic cénacle in london, as his relation with his chosen school friend under the intensity of boyish choosing, are ornamentally hung up, differ not so much in degree as in kind from any play of presentation that we mostly see elsewhere offered us. to which we might add other like matters that we lack space to enumerate, the scene, the aspect, the figure in motion tending always, under touches thick and strong, to emerge and flush, sound and strike, catch us in its truth. we have read “tales of school life” in which the boys more or less swarmed and sounded, but from which the masters have practically been quite absent, to the great weakening of any picture of the boyish consciousness, on which the magisterial fact is so heavily projected. if that is less true for some boys than for others, the “point” of michael fane is that for him it is truest. the types of masters have in “sinister street” both number and salience, rendered though they be mostly as grotesques—which effect we take as characterising the particular turn of mind of the young observer and discoverer commemorated.

that he is a discoverer is of the essence of his interest, a successful and resourceful young discoverer, even as the poor ballet-girl in “carnival” is a tragically baffled and helpless one; so that what each of the works proposes to itself is a recital of the things discovered. those thus brought to our view in the boy’s case are of much more interest, to our sense, than like matters in the other connection, thanks to his remarkable and living capacity; the heroine of “carnival” is frankly too minute a vessel of experience for treatment on the scale on which the author has honoured her—she is done assuredly, but under multiplications of touch that become too much, in the narrow field, monotonies; and she leaves us asking almost as much what she exhibitionally means, what application resides in the accumulation of facts concerning her, as if she too were after all but a slice, or at the most but a slice of a slice, and her history but one of the aspects, on her author’s part, of the condition of repleteness against the postulate of the entire adequacy of which we protest. so far as this record does affect us as an achieved “extract,” to reiterate our term, that result abides in its not losing its centre, which is its fidelity to the one question of her dolefully embarrassed little measure of life. we know to that extent with some intensity what her producer would be at, yet an element of the arbitrary hangs for us about the particular illustration—illustrations leaving us ever but half appreciative till we catch that one bright light in which they give out all they contain. this light is of course always for the author to set somewhere. is it set then so much as it should be in “sinister street,” and is our impression of the promise of this recital one with a dawning divination of the illustrative card that mr. mackenzie may still have up his sleeve and that our after sense shall recognise as the last thing left on the table? by no means, we can as yet easily say, for if a boy’s experience has ever been given us for its face value simply, for what it is worth in mere recovered intensity, it is so given us here. of all the saturations it can in fact scarce have helped being the most sufficient in itself, for it is exactly, where it is best, from beginning to end the remembered and reported thing, that thing alone, that thing existent in the field of memory, though gaining value too from the applied intelligence, or in other words from the lively talent, of the memoriser. the memoriser helps, he contributes, he completes, and what we have admired in him is that in the case of each of the pearls fished up by his dive—though indeed these fruits of the rummage are not all pearls—his mind has had a further iridescence to confer. it is the fineness of the iridescence that on such an occasion matters, and this appeal to our interest is again and again on mr. compton mackenzie’s page of the happiest and the brightest. it is never more so than when we catch him, as we repeatedly do, in the act of positively caring for his expression as expression, positively providing for his phrase as a fondly foreseeing parent for a child, positively loving it in the light of what it may do for him—meeting revelations, that is, in what it may do, and appearing to recognise that the value of the offered thing, its whole relation to us, is created by the breath of language, that on such terms exclusively, for appropriation and enjoyment, we know it, and that any claimed independence of “form” on its part is the most abject of fallacies. do these things mean that, moved by life, this interesting young novelist is even now uncontrollably on the way to style? we might cite had we space several symptoms, the very vividest, of that possibility; though such an appearance in the field of our general survey has against it presumptions enough to bring us surely back to our original contention—the scant degree in which that field has ever had to reckon with criticism.