must be adopted cautiously, for the young men and women of the present generation become themselves 'back numbers' with an amazing celerity.

Allow me to put an end to these tortuosities with a quotation from Gibbon, after reading the ninth chapter of Longinus:

"The ninth chapter, which treats of the elevation of ideas, is one of the finest monuments of antiquity. Till

now, I was acquainted only with two ways of criticizing a beautiful passage, the one to show, by an exact anatomy of it, the distinct beauties of it, and whence they sprung- the other, an idle exclamation or a general encomium which leaves nothing behind it. Longinus has shown me there is a third. He tells me his own feelings upon reading it, and tells them with such energy that he communicates them.'

1

FOR a week I have gazed across the sea at Mr. Compton Mackenzie's island home of Jethou. Every day I have planned to cross over, and every day I have been defeated, either by fog or wind or the failure of the only available motor-boat on my own island. It is no joke, this Great Russell between Sark and Jethou, by no means to be negotiated by small craft in bad weather; and the Little Russell on the farther side between Jethou and Guernsey is not much better. Compton Mackenzie has chosen to exile himself upon his island, and this is typical of both the man and his work. As a rule, the average English man-novelist can be found in either Chelsea or Bloomsbury, if he is not at the Savage Club. Going from one literary dinner-party to another, you meet inevitably the same group. If you fail to get a word with Mr. J. D. Swinnerpole at the P. E. N. dinner, you are not too greatly 1 From T. P.'s and Cassell's Weekly (London popular journal), February 27 and March 6

discouraged, because you are sure to meet him to-morrow evening at the After-Dinner Club. But not so with Mr. Compton Mackenzie. If you were to miss him at one dinner, you would probably not get a chance to see him again for a year at least, as his appearances in London are few and fleeting and mostly connected with what is at present the great interest of his life, which is not literature but the gramophone.

This again is characteristic. Because he is himself a novelist, Mr. Mackenzie does not therefore believe that novel-writing or even literature is the most important of the arts; he would give that honor to music, though he himself is no performer and serves his goddess but in the most humble capacity.

Because he has kept out of the main stream of London literary life, and kept himself free of the philosophies and conventions of literary people, there is about his work an originality and a

freedom that can scarcely be found elsewhere in modern English literature. Perhaps the aloofness is the consequence of the originality and freedom rather than their cause; but no matter how these two may stand in relation to each other as cause and effect, there is no denying that Mr. Compton Mackenzie's position in modern English literature is unique.

Even those who do not admire him as a novelist cannot accuse him of either tameness or conventionality or a following in the steps of other men. It is perhaps this very independence that is responsible for certain looks askance that he gets from some quarters. The modern critical tendency is all for comparison and classification, but what are you to do with a man who one year writes a trilogy founded entirely on religious experience and the next produces a serial for a picture newspaper? Personally, I think it is glorious to be able to do both, and Mr. Mackenzie is the only living author who can.

When we look back on his career we see that from the beginning he has been a man unbound unbound by style, school, subject, or environment. His first novel was historical, an elegant and charming re-creation of the eighteenth century in Bath. The Passionate Elopement is a complete success in its own line; it attracted a great deal of attention and enthusiasm at the time of its publication, and the literary world waited for Mr. Compton Mackenzie to repeat himself. But where many another author would have been content to re-create, as his second effort, the eighteenth century at Tunbridge Wells or the seventeenth century at Oxford, the author of The Passionate Elopement leapt straight into modern theatrical life and gave us in Carnival the story of a typical show-girl of to-day.

Carnival astonished where The Passionate Elopement had delighted. Mr.

Mackenzie's knowledge of theatrical life enabled him to give of it a picture that was sometimes almost too realistic for modern taste, yet over it all he cast the glamour which is his own particular gift, and which in my own opinion is his greatest gift. Perhaps the glamour is more obvious in Carnival than in later novels novels the lights are brighter and cruder. Personally, I do not know how the book would reread. It is a tribute to it, and to the thrill of my first impressions, that I have never dared to make the attempt. I could not face the risk of being disillusioned in Carnival, and that is perhaps as great a compliment to the author as to say that I had read it again and again.

Carnival made Mr. Compton Mackenzie a famous author, and all literary England and America awaited his third novel.

Sinister Street is in many ways his most remarkable achievement. By its very nature it was published in two

volumes of about two hundred thousand words each- it is not so well constructed and satisfactory a work of art as Carnival, but it is even more challenging and more interesting. The critics, of course, found more to criticize. Carnival had been received with almost unanimous applause; it was both interesting as a novel and glamorous as a work of art. It was almost impossible to criticize it, for the glamour had this remarkable quality, that it caught the critics too.

But there was less glamour, and perhaps less interest, in the conventional sense of the term, in Sinister Street. The detailed story of the youth and adolescence of a man who will eventually become a priest has its languors and its disappointments. Michael Fane is more alive at some periods than at others. Also, in the necessary discarding of plot Mr. Mackenzie may have too defiantly ignored rules of construction.

Nevertheless the book is one of the most remarkable novels published in England this century, and one which had the distinction of starting a new school in English fiction. For some time after it appeared the libraries were stuffed with the life stories of young men who went to school, and then to college, and were abandoned by their authors on the threshold of adult life and love.

This fashion has naturally passed, but Sinister Street may be said to have revived the 'cradle to grave' novel among us, the story that is a simple narration of a man's or woman's life rather than the dealing with any special situation or complications in it. This type of novel is, of course, one of the oldest types, but it had died out during the nineties of last century, when French standards of technique prevailed. Mr. Mackenzie revived it with all the advantages of an improved technique.

These three novels The Passionate Elopement, Carnival, and Sinister Street - are in three distinct and different styles.

His fourth novel, Guy and Pauline, was also in a sense a new experiment, though it made use of characters and situations that had already been dealt with in Sinister Street. Mr. Mackenzie, by the way, is one of those authors whose characters continue his lifelong friends; they are not discarded when the book is finished, but are reintroduced and used again and again.

On the advantages of the method I have never been able to make up my mind. Sometimes it is a disappointment rather than a delight to meet a much-loved character on another occasion; but, on the other hand, it has given a reality to fiction which has been dear unto many ever since Balzac wrote La Comédie Humaine, and Mr. Mackenzie's novels are a real comédie

humaine. Michael Fane, Maurice Avory, Sylvia Scarlett, Father Dorward, and other personalities link up their diverse styles into a characteristic unity. Guy and Pauline has strong affinities with Sinister Street, in that it is the story of a young Oxford man whom we have met before in the earlier novels, but in many ways it disappointed the admirers of the earlier book, owing to the extraordinary quietness of its style and situations.

Put baldly, Guy and Pauline is the story of a young Oxford man, not in very comfortable circumstances, who becomes engaged to a clergyman's daughter. For financial reasons their engagement drags on without any definite plans for marriage, and is finally broken off. That is all the story, spreading through over three hundred pages. Those who wish for sensation, for the startling element at work in Carnival and Sinister Street, were naturally disappointed; none the less, to many of Mr. Mackenzie's critics Guy and Pauline is his masterpiece, because here his wonderful sense of glamour has really found its own. Yet there is no sensation, very little incident; the characters have nothing startling about them in the way of either vice or virtue.

One might say that the book did not contain enough incident even for a short story; and yet it triumphs. Not that it is in any way merely a tour de force; it is a genuine piece of artistic construction, and marks, perhaps, the climax of Mr. Mackenzie's artistic achievement.

There is a gulf fixed between Guy and Pauline and Mr. Mackenzie's later work-a gulf that yawns across the work of many a man, or indeed woman, novelist of this period, the gulf of the years 1914 to 1918. With Mr. Mackenzie it is dug deeper than with some; one would surely say that he has a greater sensitiveness to environment and contemporary life than most novel

ists. After the war and his experiences in it-chiefly in connection with the Gallipoli campaign - it was impossible for him to write as he had written before, but his love for his old characters remained, and we find that his first novel after the silence is a reconstruction of the life of Sylvia Scarlett, that strange, tantalizing woman who had appeared for baffling glimpses in Sinister Street.

Frankly, the novel was a disappointment. The war seemed completely to have changed Mr. Mackenzie's style, and reading Sylvia Scarlett was like witnessing a cinematograph film very hurriedly shown. Sylvia rushes and darts about the Balkans and the Near East, so that one scarcely seems to get near enough to her for observation, and at the end of the book one feels one knows her less than at the end of Sinister Street. Rather in the same style is Sylvia and Michael, which followed. Looking back on them, I am not sure whether the fact of his having produced two novels like cinematograph films is not another instance of the artistic sensitiveness of Mr. Mackenzie's mind; to have sat down and written deliberately and brightly in the midst of those catastrophic years, or even immediately after them, would have argued an insensitiveness which he most definitely does not possess.

He followed the two Sylvia novels with yet another experiment. Poor Relations and its companion novel, Rich Relatives, are novels of humor alone. There has always been humor in Mr. Mackenzie's books, but here are two novels entirely given up to it, and he shows himself a master of the comic character and the comic situation.

His books seem now to follow each other more rapidly. The Vanity Girl is a not very successful return to the style of Carnival. The Seven Ages of Woman is curiously colorless for Mr.

Mackenzie. He seems to be growing hurried, almost impatient with himself and his art, to be unable to find a subject in which he is truly interested. Then suddenly he returns to his old manner, and the old glamour reasserts itself, though not for every man to see, in his religious trilogy, The Parson's Progress.

With this trilogy many parted company with Mr. Mackenzie, but to some of the critics it seemed the long-wishedfor return to his earlier manner. At last he had found a subject in which he was himself deeply interested and with which he was profoundly competent to deal. Just as there had been humor in his novels long before he had written a novel that could be described as entirely humorous, so there had been religion in his books before he came to write a novel that could be called religious. In the three novels that form the complete Parson's Progress the interest is exclusively religious. They are the spiritual history of a new Michael Fane, one Mark Lidderdale. Brought up and priested in the Anglican Church, he becomes deeply involved in the more swashbuckling element of the AngloCatholic movement in the Church of England, and finally, after certain experiences in the war, revolts from Anglicanism and joins the Church of Rome.

On looking into the future I feel that Mr. Mackenzie has already indicated the lines on which he will finally and fully express himself. Since The Parson's Progress he has given us The Old Man of the Sea and Coral, the first a new departure, the second a fresh return to the Carnival manner. But the new way is but a bypath, and the old seems now definitely at an end. With his understanding of modern life, of human love, and of that religious impulse which is both the synthesis of all human emotion and its unifying link with

worlds beyond it, he has it in his power to write a novel greater than any that English literature has yet produced.

It is this that makes him so profoundly interesting even when he is not producing his best work. Personally, I would rather read bad novel by Compton Mackenzie than a good novel by almost any other modern novelist you could name; he has about him a vital quality that one knows some day will inevitably surprise one. I feel that he is bound sooner or later to produce something really good, because, though perhaps his work has not yet achieved either the success or the greatness of some, he has capacities that no other living writer possesses.

At the present moment he is still a young man, and in spite of his earlier successes I do not feel that he has written himself out or even attained his highest achievement. When he really does his best it will be something entirely beyond the matter of small emotion and careful technique that has come to be regarded as the best among us. He will probably achieve this success by a return to his earlier methods, to the method most characteristic of him- that is, the method of Sinister Street. But the return will not be in the same manner as the start, for Mr. Mackenzie has traveled far in the meantime, and will bring his sheaves with him.

THOSE Who have read Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh will have been struck by the frequency of the biological references they contain. Nor are these references accidental. Samuel Butler was not a novelist, but a biologist who wrote occasional satire to amuse himself and to satisfy his spleen — a fact which the wide popularity of his fictional works has caused to be overlooked. His biological theories, ignored by contemporary scientists and for a dozen years after his death referred to in terms of contemptuous ridicule by the few biologists who condescended to notice him, have recently been vindicated by a number of experiments,

1 From the Spectator (London Moderate Conservative weekly), February 20, 27

the revolutionary bearing of which upon our conception of the universe continues to escape general notice only because of the average scientist's constitutional inability to use his imagination to grasp the implication of his facts.

Since this evidence settles once and for all the timeworn controversy between the advocates of heredity and the advocates of environment as the factors chiefly determining character, - or, more precisely, since it finally determines the respects in which this it controversy never can be settled, deserves the attention of that great body of scientists who, although they have never entered a laboratory in their lives, are justified of that title by their