The Novels of Mr. Compton Mackenzie
By JOHN FREEMAN
Wise men have foretold the death of imaginative literature. Spider-like, science will seize the body of this gilded fly, stab it methodically into numbness, and then, feeding upon its vitals, will exhaust and destroy the useless thing. With sedulous precision the scientist will do what the artist, alas, has failed to do more than vaguely and uncertainly: he will re-interpret life, he will rediscover man’s relation to a vaster Universe. Ignoring or spurning all attempts at the æsthetic apprehension of the significance of life and time, he will at length announce his own positive formula by which all phenomena and all relations must be valued. It is the scientist who will feel and communicate, with a dry ecstasy wholly his own, the isolation of man amid the meanness or the majesty of the world. That language which we yet speak, stiff with ancestral associations, will be discarded; obscure symbols, their order intelligible perhaps to another scientist but to no one else, will be used to express the secrets of life and riddles of death Thebes never knew. The watcher of the skies will be no Keats: back to his galley-pots will every Keats be driven. In the midst of that web called science the spider will sit with vigilant eyes, holding their cunning in momentary suspense, swelling with vaster and vaster accumulations.
It is not poetry alone that is threatened: imaginative art is not confined to poetry. The strange thing is that when Thomas Hardy has carried an imaginative view of life to a finer expression than that of any artist of his time, and shown how easily prose may wear the strict shackles of scientific precision, that prose itself should find no younger masters ready to use and develop it; as if Hardy’s forsaking of prose for verse were no simple forsaking, but rather a subtle betrayal. Unique success is his in combining the imaginative with the scientific, the emotional with the rational, in his novels; his younger contemporaries seem to have failed equally in both directions.
It would be absurd to charge this dereliction to any single novelist or group of novelists. Mr. Conrad, for instance, simply evades the charge by being in his turn unique; Mr. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett fail in varying degrees but in both directions, and of their fellows it is hard to think of any who has not similarly failed. Where gifts are eminent the failure is eminent: hence this preface to remarks upon the novels of Mr. Compton Mackenzie. Diligent, observant, experienced, inexhaustible, or at any rate unexhausted, he has made his opportunities and gained a hearing; indeed, as he reminds us in the second volume of Sinister Street, he has won the greater advantage of a hearing refused, the libraries having so ineffably rejected the first volume. Nevertheless, from him that hath not—— What is it, in fact, that has deprived him of the truest fruit of the gifts which he has? I make no attempt to disguise the fact that Mr. Mackenzie appears to be a writer who is not an imaginative artist, yet who might have been an imaginative artist; a novelist who has not concerned himself with life at all save in its external and mechanic motions. He has not confined himself to a single manner: his first book, The Passionate Elopement, was an eighteenth-century story in a style familiarised by less capable and less versatile practitioners. Little indeed was to be expected from an author whose first book contained such writing as:
Presently he saw her join a blue mask and lose herself in the flickering throng. Last time he had remarked particularly that her vis-à-vis wore brown and gold, yet the two figures were alike in movement and gesture, and he could swear the hands were identical. It was the same without a doubt. Charles bit his nails with vexation, and fretted confoundedly.
“My dear boy, my dear Charles, pray do not gnaw your fingers. Narcissus admired himself, ’tis true, but without carrying his devotion to cannibality.”
Charles turned to the well-known voice of Mr. Ripple.
“A thousand pardons, dear Beau, I was vexed by a trifle. The masquerade comports itself with tolerable success.”
—and the glitter and varnish of an upholstered narrative casually spangled with Meredithean brightness. But Mr. Mackenzie’s second novel, Carnival, disappointed expectation by being readable. Like some of its successors, it might be mistaken for realistic; while another, Guy and Pauline, might be termed idyllic by those who love the phrase. He moves and changes; he is a part of all that he has met; and you wonder at length what he is. For myself, I am reminded frequently of an ingenious character seen in provincial music-halls, who to the eyes of a happy audience swiftly and imperceptibly invests and divests himself of many costumes of marvellous hue—one growing plain as another is impetuously flung off, blue gloves giving place to pink, a crimson shirt to an emerald, a shooting-jacket to a dinner-jacket—until I laugh unrestrainably.
Mr. Mackenzie has not sought a fugitive and cloistered virtue; his characters, as Johnson said of Gilbert Walmsley, mingle in the great world without exemption from its follies and its vices. He loves their activities; he sets them going and follows their whirring motion with the ruthless gaiety of a child playing with toys, who stops them, breaks them, and sometimes sets them going again. He understands mechanics and they must move; and when they are run down in one book he winds them up again for another. He hurries hither and thither, clutching at the skirts of perpetual motion like that other pageant master, time. His scene is the capitals of Europe or a railway train between them. He shares with his characters, of whatever age, their brilliant youth. He invents untiringly. He does not vex himself or his readers with description, but if he pauses to paint he paints with unmistakable bright colours. He writes clearly: there is seldom a slovenly sentence, never a memorable one. He has a cruelly accurate ear for slang, and presents vulgarity with fond verisimilitude. Femininity haunts him; his flowers, even, remind him of frills. Something of extreme youth clings to his books—its zestfulness, curiosity, indiscriminateness, and its unregretful volatility. But when, you may ask, remembering at once his gifts and his opportunities, his gifts and the world amid which they are exercised, when will he grow up? When, rather, will he grow down and strike first roots into the dark earth of the mind? When, amid all his brisk preoccupations with men and women, will he touch life?
Leaving generalisation, it is interesting to look at one of the simplest of Mr. Mackenzie’s novels, Guy and Pauline, published in 1915, and conspicuously dedicated to the Commander-in-Chief and the General Staff of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. It is the story of Guy Hazlewood (wound up again after Sinister Street) and a rector’s daughter. Guy, returned from Macedonian Relief Fund work, is charmed by a watery Oxfordshire house called Plashers Mead, and settles there to write poetry. The rectory family are his neighbours, and with the rector’s daughters, Margaret, Monica, and Pauline, he quickly obtains a brotherly footing, and then becomes engaged to the youngest. The rector is a shadowy gardener with a singular fondness for answering every question, upon whatever subject and of whatever importance, by a reference to a blossoming or decaying plant; an idiosyncrasy which is supposed to endear him to his family. And it is an “endearing” book. Everybody is unvaryingly sweet; the adjective is as common and as adhesive as mud. The three girls form a group of the kind for which the far more finely observant and delicate art of Miss Viola Meynell (among living novelists) has already obtained and exhausted our sympathy. Ungracious as the comparison must seem to both writers, it is irresistible and fatal. Linked sweetness too long drawn out becomes tiresome, and the indistinct softness of the style makes the book something more than tiresome.
Pauline hurried through a shower to church on Easter morning, and shook mingled tears and raindrops from herself when she saw that Guy was come to Communion. So then that angel had travelled from her bedside last night to hover over Guy and bid him wake early next morning, because it was Easter Day. With never so holy a calm had she knelt in the jewelled shadows of that chancel or returned from the altar to find her pew imparadised. When the people came out of church the sun was shining, and on the trees and on the tombstones a multitude of birds were singing. Never had Pauline felt the spirit of Eastertide uplift her with such a joy, joy for her lover beside her, joy for summer close at hand, joy for all the joy that Easter could bring to the soul.
Elsewhere:
The apple trees were already frilled with a foam of blossom; and on quivering boughs linnets with breasts rose-burnt by the winds of March throbbed out their carol. Chaffinches with flashing prelude of silver wings flourished a burst of song that broke as with too intolerable a triumph: then sought another tree and poured forth the triumphant song again. Thrushes, blackbirds and warblers quired deep-throated melodies against the multitudinous trebles of those undistinguished myriads that with choric pæan saluted May; and on sudden diminuendoes could be heard the rustling canzonets of the goldfinches, rising and falling with reedy cadences.
The story is clogged by Guy’s meditations upon “poetical ambition”—he is in the early twenties—and yet, with all these grievous handicaps, it survives with sufficient force to express the poignancy with which an incomplete passion may sink to oblivion. In Pauline Mr. Mackenzie has succeeded in showing with simplicity and truth the quick development of a child to a passionate, then a despairing, and at last a forsaken woman; and in Guy the æsthetic frog swollen to a fraction larger than his nature and then relapsing into insignificance. I am not sure that the best of this novelist’s achievement is not seen in the isolation of these characters, the sufficiency of quiet incident, and the sense—faintly yet perceptibly communicated—that the tragedy of separation is implicit in the persons of his story. The atmosphere may seem close, the setting fanciful, scenes, characters, and action diminished and slightly prettified; yet there is genuine movement, rise and decline. The occasion of Guy’s last parting from Pauline is worth noting, if only because Guy happens to be but the present name of Mr. Mackenzie’s invariable young man from Oxford; let it be remembered, however, that Guy reappears years after in Sylvia and Michael as a larger shadow and dies with the Serbians before Nish.
“Even if temporarily I were interested in another girl, you may be quite sure that she would always be second to you.”
“But you might be interested?” Pauline asked breathlessly.
“I must be free if I’m going to be an artist.”
“Free?” she echoed slowly.
There remains a negative merit. If the artist, as a hundred critics have asserted and a thousand authors forgotten, is proved by what he omits, it must be counted to Mr. Mackenzie for a virtue that this book of four hundred pages does not contain a single seduction, and that, despite the obvious piquancy of a contrast between Plashers Mead and a London night-club, he has so easily and so blessedly avoided it.
The point is the more proper for remembrance inasmuch as such forbearance is the last straining of the quality of mercy in this author. Mr. Mackenzie commonly prefers cities to country scenes, although a country scene in his earliest novel yielded him his first opportunity of teasing innocent readers with an unsavoury interior. Since he is a cultured writer you might imagine that Hogarth had tutored him; but Hogarth is immensely masculine, and the origin of our novelist’s inspiration need be sought no farther back than the ‘nineties. Nothing is more surprising, at any rate to men approaching middle-age, than the fitful incandescence of that spark with which the ‘nineties were tinily illuminated. The inferior intelligence and the yet more inferior imagination which impelled certain artists—pleased with the phrase decadent—to magnify the ferment of youthful senses, may now seem even more trivial in their fruition than an Olympian judgment would allow. But it is hard to be impartial when a purely remote contemplation is forbidden by the flashing reflections from living writers who are only in a narrow sense contemporary writers. Coventry Patmore, chief poet and almost chief artist in that church of which we hear so much in Mr. Mackenzie’s novels, asserted with more force than originality that what is morally bad is necessarily bad art; and he proceeded to say, less tritely, that the delicate indecency of so much modern art was partly due to deficient virility which, in proportion to its strength, is naturally modest. Pleading for plain-speaking, he maintained that indecency (which only a fool could identify with plain-speaking) is an endeavour to irritate sensations and appetites in the absence of natural passion; that which passes with so many for power and ardour being really, in his certain and indignant eyes, impotence and coldness. The distinction between plain-speaking and delicate indecency is to be remembered when Mr. Mackenzie’s most ambitious attempts at the English novel, Sinister Street and Sylvia Scarlett, are considered. There may be coarseness of expression, a fondness for trivial bluntness of phrase; but it would be stupid to see in that more than coarseness or bluntness. The theme of Sinister Street, says the author, is the youth of a man who will presumably be a priest; a theme developed in nearly four hundred thousand words by something like the process of “annual elongation” which Johnson observed in a Hebridean road. The book moves upon familiar biographical lines—the lonely children, the local school and lesser public school, Oxford, and the betrayed passion for a prostitute. It is an enormous and minute chronicle—of what? Of the externals of a boy’s life, of the customs of school, flirtation with vulgar girls, evasions of school tasks, the ways of a decrepit group surviving from the ‘nineties, Catholic ritual, and a little introspection here and there; and then, in the second volume, of the same externals of Oxford life drawn to the same scale. Such a scheme must needs attract the tens who have been to public school and University, and delight the tens of thousands who haven’t. Is it taking a mean advantage of time’s passage to compare Sinister Street with Serge Aksakoff’s Years of Childhood and its successors? Aksakoff treats childhood with a simplicity, a quiet intentness, by the side of which Mr. Mackenzie’s enormous reconstruction seems loose and artificial. Sinister Street is vast in size and meagre in content. It is packed with superfluities. Three-fourths of it is inessential to the author’s declared intention; it is no more than a guide-book cleverly designed (e.g., the first week at Oxford) to evoke an illusion of Oxford in Pimlico and Shepherd’s Bush; and concentrating upon the remaining fourth, you feel that your author has been aware of little more than the physiology of adolescence and the usual facile religious reactions. Boys from seventeen to twenty-three, girls from sixteen to any age, may find in Henry Meats alias Brother Aloysius, in Arthur Wilmot the last of the Decadents, in the Lilys and the Daisys of the streets, in the whole rank multitude of Mr. Mackenzie’s “underworld,” the irritation of sensation which adolescents naturally seek. Here may curiosity be half-satisfied, half-stimulated. A Guide to Prostitution could add little to the informations of Sinister Street: the dress, the habitation, even the finances of those who have “gone gay,” are meticulously recorded. Passed, I am afraid, are the Orient promenade and the underground gilded sty, but their glory is not departed, it is merely transferred, and Sinister Street remains sufficiently lively and up to date to provoke the youngest and make the oldest feel young again. Do you ask why God gives brains for such a use? I cannot even guess. Mr. Mackenzie astonishingly blazons his book with Keats’s famous analysis: “The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, etc.”—an astonishing phrase for index to this book; whether used in simplicity or in subtle defiance, this also I cannot guess. Clear enough is it that what passes for imagination is no other than the froth of yesty waves of youth.... It is a book written, if offence may be disavowed and avoided, by a boy for boys. Mr. Mackenzie himself, in his introductory letter, refers to his study of Russian writers (this in explanation of the length of his novels), and in his epilogical letter he apparently regards the book as a work of art. An author’s opinion of his own intention is to be respected, for who shall challenge it? It does but afford an additional ground for judgment and surprise.
To consider Sinister Street a mere aberration is an extravagant possibility, but possibility itself is left panting behind Sylvia Scarlett. Here, again, the author is generous of space, and here he has not been content to write a guide-book. He has chosen a woman for his central figure, and she, unlike the male protagonists of the other books, is no coloured cloudy reflection of a reflection. She is no minikin Michael or Guy or Maurice, but a semblable moving figure. Sinister Street is her place of origin, Vanity Fair her scene of action—a world of music-halls where farce passes for fantasy and women’s dress for an exciting theme. Farce? Sylvia is not only farcical in herself, but is, like Falstaff, creative—the cause of farce in others; and though Book One opens so admirably with a paragraph showing how well the author can follow a good model, farce ensues and recurs and makes her chronicle an amusing thing.
But it is amusing only so long as coarseness is not strained through a child’s mind, coarseness of phrase only or more significant coarseness of invention. I say more significant, for whether that worse coarseness is intended or involuntary must be immaterial, save as indicating the particular code against which the offence is primarily committed, the code of manners or the code of art. There is here no such gentleness in the treatment of childhood as distinguishes the earlier chapters of Carnival.... The point need not be stressed. I dislike the current practice of setting one’s wits against the author whose work happens to be the subject of discussion; I don’t want to produce an artificial dilemma and pretend that Mr. Mackenzie is inevitably trapped by it. Put it, then, that there are certain obligations of civilised life, and certain obligations of that flower of civilised life which we call art; put it that coarseness of phrase or incident outrages the former, and that an intention to commit that outrage, or an insensibility of having committed it, is equally an offence against the less assertive but not less imperative obligations of art. In a word, the sin is vulgarity, two-edged vulgarity it may be, an offence against both canons or, if you will, both conventions; and the further weight hangs on the charge that it is here committed in the person of a child, and is, therefore, wanton. Shall I add that the immanence of farce just spoken of does in a little degree mitigate the cruelty by generalising the vulgarity? Here is rude, healthy Smollett out-Smolletted, reduced to the uncostly and only half-odious horseplay of a music-hall:
The encouragement put a fine spirit into Danny’s blows; he hammered the unfortunate Cohen round and round the room, upsetting table and chairs and washstand until with a stinging blow he knocked him backwards into the slop-pail, in which he sat so heavily that when he tried to rise the slop-pail stuck and gave him the appearance of a large baboon crawling with elevated rump on all fours. Danny kicked off the slop-pail, and invited Cohen to stand up to him; but when he did get on his feet, he ran to the door and reached the stairs just as Mrs. Gonner was wearily ascending to find out what was happening. He tried to stop himself by clutching the knob of the baluster, which broke; the result was that he dragged Mrs. Gonner with him in a glissade which ended behind the counter. The confusion in the shop became general; Mr. Gonner cut his thumb, and the sight of the blood caused a woman who was eating a sausage to choke; another customer took advantage of the row to snatch a side of bacon and try to escape, but another customer with a finer moral sense prevented him; a dog who was sniffing in the entrance saw the bacon on the floor and tried to seize it, but getting his tail trodden upon by somebody, he took fright and bit a small boy, who was waiting to change a shilling into coppers. Meanwhile Sylvia, who expected every minute that Jubie and her pugilistic brother would come back and increase the confusion with possibly unpleasant consequences for herself, took advantage of Danny’s being occupied in an argument with Cohen and the two Gonners to put on her hat and escape from the shop. She jumped on the first omnibus and congratulated herself when she looked round and saw a policeman entering the eating-house.
Sylvia herself is capable enough as well as universally attractive. The citation just made is from a passage following the second amorous attack upon her, when Danny Lewis threatens her with a knife, and she parries with the water in her bedroom. An earlier lover had retired from a similar contest with his underlip bitten through. When, some time after the knife-and-water episode, Sylvia meets the Oxford type in Philip Iredale, she is sent by him (being still but sixteen) for a year’s schooling and then marries him. Coquetting with the Church is followed by flight—alone, it must be added; and indeed Sylvia’s whole recorded life is fugitive, a pilgrimage between this world and some other. Three months later her husband’s Oxford composure is shocked by:
“You must divorce me now. I’ve not been able to earn enough to pay you back more than this [ten pounds] for your bad bargain. I don’t think I’ve given any more pleasure to the men who have paid less for me than you did, if that’s any consolation.”
Adventures repeat themselves. A huge Russian officer bursts into Sylvia’s room one night and is pitched out of the window by a couple of acrobats. The war begins and spreads itself over Europe as a background for her passages and parleyings; and maybe the Commander-in-Chief and the General Staff of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force have beguiled many a tiresome after-war hour in pursuing Sylvia’s wanderings between places familiarised by their late anxieties. Sylvia is differentiated from the other women of these novels, not only by her superior capacity for experiences, but even more by her superior volubility. She is, consciously, mind as well as body, and as the narrative goes on and on she develops a passion for monologue—terrifying in any woman, and rare among women whose occupation Sylvia Scarlett’s own name is perhaps meant assonantally to suggest. These monologues, recurrent as the farce and more deadly, might be called shortly the jargon. “I represent the original conception of the Hetaera,” she asserts.
“He’ll think of me, if he ever thinks of me at all, as one of the great multitude of wronged women. I shall think of him, though as a matter of fact I shall avoid thinking of him, either as what might have been—a false concept, for, of course, what might have been is fundamentally inconceivable—or as what he was—a sentimental fool.”
She meditates upon the art of Botticelli, whose appeal she seems to think is only childlike, upon the conflict of nationality with civilisation. She reads Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky, putting Apuleius by, goes to confession, analyses her sensations, details the errancy of her parentage, and seeks to shock the priest who, when Sylvia acutely suggests that God is “almost vulgarly anthropomorphic,” can only murmur, “Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?” But here is a brief specimen of the almost unbroken monologue to which the priest of the wisest of the churches can make no answer but a profession of the power of the Church:
“I suppose my running away was the direct result of my bringing up, because whenever I had been brought face to face with a difficult situation I ran away. However, this time I was determined from some perverted pride to make myself more utterly myself than I had ever done. It’s hard to explain how my mind worked. You must remember I was only nineteen, and already at thirty-one I am as far from understanding all my motives then as if I were trying to understand somebody who was not myself at all. Anyhow, I simply went on the streets. For three months I mortified my flesh by being a harlot. Can you understand that? Can you possibly understand the deliberate infliction of such a discipline, not to humiliate one’s pride but to exalt it? Can you understand that I emerged from that three months of incredible horror with a complete personality?...”
Sylvia did not wait for the priest to answer this question, partly because she did not want to be disillusioned by finding so soon that he had not comprehended anything of her emotions or actions, partly because there seemed more important revelations of herself still to be made.
—Farce at least is unpretentious, but this crude jargon, this retroverted intellectualism, is offensive beyond farce, odious beyond “delicate indecency.”
It may not be wholly due to perversity if the characteristics of these long biographical novels should overshadow the sharp merits of, say, Carnival. Carnival, even better than Guy and Pauline, may serve as a measure of Mr. Mackenzie’s decline from his promise; since although its conclusion is a disharmony, its best chapters are good enough to cause a reader to sigh over the later novels. Was it, indeed, quite a worthless aim to follow in the footsteps of George Gissing? Carnival suggests that a new Gissing might have grown up before our eyes, with a touch of the same veracity, the same mordancy, and a little less than the same humourless and dishumoured regard for what is wry and hapless; but Carnival stands alone, and the exactions of that difficult sincerity have been put by.... Or take, again, Poor Relations, the latest of Mr. Mackenzie’s inventions. With its ease and brilliant vivacities, with the comedy of its conception, what a delightful play it would make! But might not the comedy have depended—as comedy must—more surely upon character and less upon incident? The author of Sylvia Scarlett, however, has imposed a too-swift facility upon the author of Poor Relations. If practice makes perfect, then nothing was wanting to the completeness of Poor Relations—but how much is wanting! Admirable are the opening notes, but of the rest too much is a brisk falsetto. There is excess in the situations, excess in the characterisation, excess in the style:
When he looked at the old lady he could not discover anything except a cold egotism in every fold of those flabby cheeks where the powder lay like drifted snow in the ruts of a sunless lane.
It is equally the virtue and the fault of Mr. Mackenzie that he provokes melancholy regrets, even in the middle of frequent chuckles; and when the chuckling has died away the shadow of Sylvia Scarlett falls upon the book, just as with the same unhappy denigration it is flung backwards over the better qualities of the earlier Carnival.
Yet Poor Relations, like Guy and Pauline, is free from the worst flaw of the longer novels, the crude determination to shock, which breaks most starkly through the superficialities of Sylvia Scarlett. That is a breach of the code of art rather than the code of morals, an eruptive épatism which would disfigure a better book, if it could be found there. Can you conceive a more attractive subject, if you are but three-and-twenty, than the philosophic harlot? Or an easier? I do not suppose that it is less interesting to be on the streets than to be in the Ministry of Food; neither occupation can be objectionable as subject of a novel. It would be untrue to say that the subject of a novel is a thing of complete indifference, and that the treatment is everything; for a writer would not do wisely to forfeit the advantage which a subject might offer him. But neither would he do wisely in exploiting a subject only to excite the curiosity or astonish the simplicity of his reader. Merely adventitious at best is the gain. It is to reduce subject and treatment to their lowest terms, and reject the implicit conditions which confront every writer who would explore the imaginative world where there can be no laws save honour, loyalty, and delicacy. The scientific writer is secured against deceiving himself or his readers for long; his assumptions can be verified, his deductions precisely analysed, his whole professions rationally weighed. The imaginative and the quasi-imaginative writer have no such security, nor their readers such protection. Traditional values may be inapplicable; it is hard to discriminate novelty from originality. A book that shocks may be as profoundly conceived as Jude the Obscure, as cheaply fashioned as Sylvia Scarlett. Incident may be prodigal equally in Dostoieffsky and Mr. Compton Mackenzie, but significance of incident may vary infinitely. Mr. Mackenzie’s incidents have no significance; they remain incidents. His thoughts are insignificant except in so far as they indicate a modern intellectual disvertebration. His view of character is insignificant except in so far as it betrays an adolescent apprehension. Who is Sylvia? you ask, and your author is silent. What is she? and the answer is dispersed among eight hundred garrulous pages.
Yet, it must be repeated, Mr. Mackenzie has conspicuous gifts, and, as the letters with which Sinister Street opens and closes indicate, he is aware of them, and has not undertaken these enormous fictions without a sense of his task. But he has accepted the easier way. He can invest his scene with an illusion of activity, if not of reality, but he is unable to picture reality, for he does not distinguish; neither does he create a reality, a world for himself, amenable to its own laws, establishing its own consistency. That would be a wonderful but a hard thing. Amid the booths of his Vanity Fair he moves, not soberly and critically as Christian and Faithful moved, but as one swiftly enchanted by externals. He approaches the field of imaginative art, and I cannot say that his powers and pretensions are such as must discourage entry; but for imagination he learns to substitute invention, chooses the superficial, and does not even trouble to secure the consistency of his characters; Michael Fane’s mother, for instance, being declined from an irregular great lady in Volume One to a parish imbecile in Volume Two. He might have chosen otherwise. His alertness, his preoccupation with externals, his fullness of incident, his soft fluency of style might have been flogged into subordination; he need not have been very serious to have taken his work seriously. But all that he promises now is, if the tempting derangement of a line by a modern poet be pardonable:
A torment of intolerable tales.
Mr. Mackenzie has divagated. The task of presenting reality is left to the scientific mind, and the task of creating another reality is left to the poetic mind.