A Novelist on Novels Read online

  Who is the Man?

  I

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

  Who are these men? Is it possible already to designate them? To mark outthe Hardy or the Meredith of to-morrow? The Bennett, the Wells, or theGalsworthy? It is difficult. I shall not be surprised if some quarrelwith these names, cavil at the selection and challenge a greatness whichthey look upon as transient. Those critics may be right. I do not, inthis article, attempt a valuation of those whom I will call the literarynovelists, that is to say, the men who have 'somehow,' and owing tohardly ascertained causes, won their way into the front rank of modernEnglish letters. It may be urged that these are not our big men, andthat the brazen blaring of popular trumpets has drowned the blithepiping of tenderer songsters. But, if we view facts sanely, we must allagree that there are in England five men, of whom one is a foreigner,who hold without challenge the premier position among novelists: MrArnold Bennett, Mr Joseph Conrad, Mr John Galsworthy, Mr Thomas Hardy,and Mr H. G. Wells. Theirs is a special position: there is not one ofthem, probably, whose sales would create envy in the bosom of Mr HaroldBell Wright or of Mrs Barclay; nor are they of the super-hyper classwhose works are issued in wisely limited editions and printed inover-beautiful type. They are, in a very rough way, the men of theirtime and, a very little, the men of all time. Whatever be theirgreatness or their littleness, they are the men who will, for theUniversity Extension Lecturer of 1950, represent the English novel in agiven period; they are not the most literary of their contemporaries;they have not more ideas than some of their contemporaries, and all ofthem have their faults, their mannerisms, and their lapses, but yet, ina rough and general way, these five men combine more ideas with morestyle than any who are beyond their group. 'Somehow' they stand at thehead, and I make no attempt to criticise them, to classify them: I haveeven named them in alphabetical order. Now not one of these men is underforty; one is over seventy; one approaches sixty. They must be replaced.Not yet, of course, though some of the young begin, a little rashly, tocast stones at those mature glories. But still, some time, faced as weare with a horde of novelists, not less in these islands than fifteenhundred, we must ask ourselves: Who are the young men who rear theirheads above the common rank? Which ones among them are likely to inheritthe purple?

  II

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

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

  By promise is meant a suggestion that the young man will become a bigman, that is to say that, in ten years or so, he will be the vehicle ofthe modern idea through the style of the time; he may not be verypopular, but he will not be unpopular; he will be quoted, criticised,discussed; briefly, he will matter. Now I do not suggest that the sevenmen named will inevitably become big men. There is not room for sevenbig novelists, but it is among them that, in all likelihood, the two orthree leaders will be found. And then there is the dark horse, still,perhaps, in some university, in America or in a colony, perhaps in afactory or a shop, who may sally forth, swift as a comet, and destroyour estimate; I have at least one such dark horse in my mind. But in avaluation we must reckon on the known, and it is submitted that we knownothing beyond this list.

  The manner in which these men will express themselves cannot bedetermined absolutely. The literary tradition is changing, and a new oneis being made. If the future is to give us a Balzac or a Fielding hewill not write like a Balzac or a Fielding: he will use a new style.That is why there is very little hope for those who competently followthe tradition of the past. If a _Madame Bovary_ were to be writtento-day by a man of thirty it would not be a good book; it would be apiece of literary archaeology. If the seven young men become the men ofto-morrow, it will be because they break away from the old traditions,the tradition of aloofness and the tradition of comment. They do notrigidly stand outside the canvas, as did Flaubert and de Maupassant; nordo they obviously intervene as did Thackeray. If they look back at allit is to Dostoievsky and Stendhal, that is to say, they stand midwaybetween the expression of life and the expression of themselves; indeed,they try to express both, to achieve art by 'criticising life'; theyattempt to take nature into partnership. Only they do this to a greateror lesser extent; some do little more than exploit themselves, show theworld in relation to their own autobiography; others hold up the mirrorto life and interpose between picture and object the veil of theirprejudice; and one of them is almost a commentator, for his prejudice isso strong as to become a protagonist in his drama. All this is to beexpected, for one cannot expect a little group of seven which enjoys thehigh honour of having been selected from among fifteen hundred, to bemade up of identical entities. Indeed, all must be contrasting persons:if two of them were alike, one would be worthless. And so each one hashis devil to exorcise and his guardian-angel to watch over him. Theymust, each one of them, beware of exploiting themselves overmuch ofbecoming dull as they exhaust their own history of being cold if theydraw too thin a strand of temperament across the object which theyillumine. But these dangers are only the accidents of a dangerous trade,where a man hazards his soul and may see it grow sick. If we wish tomeasure these dangers, we must then analyse the men one by one, and itwill serve us best to divide them into three groups: self-exploiters,mirror-bearers, and commentators. These are not exact divisions; theyoverlap on one another; one man denies by one book what he affirms by asecond. But, in a very rough way these divisions will serve: hesitationsand contradictions indicate, indeed better than achievement, thetempestuous course of promising youth.

  III

  Though, broadly speaking, the seven young men are profoundly interestedin themselves, there are four that attach especial importance to thelife which has made them what they are. Messrs Cannan, Walpole,Beresford, and Lawrence, capable though they be of standing outsidethemselves, are, without much doubt, happier when they stand inside. Ido not know in extreme detail where they were born or what theysuffered, but it demands no great sagacity to reconstruct, for instance,Mr Walpole as a man
who went to Cambridge, taught in a school, and laterwrote books; likewise Mr Beresford, as one who struggled up againstpoverty and physical infirmity into a place in the sunshine of letters;Mr Cannan is still more emphatically interested in the reactions of hisown harsh and sensitive temperament, while Mr Lawrence, a little morepuzzling, is very much the lover of life, telling us tales of hismistress. This is not, perhaps, because they take these facts that lienearest to their hand as the argument of their play. Each one of themhas shown by some excursion that he was capable of jerking the earth offits axis, the axis being, with him as with all of us, his ownpersonality. Thus Mr Cannan, in _Peter Homunculus_, presents inMeredithian wise, a picture of the development of a very young man, arather romantic though metallically brilliant young man predestined bynature to have a bad, but very exciting time: that is Mr Cannan. Moreclearly still, in _Little Brother_, he takes himself up again, himselfwondering in Cambridge 'what it's all for,' as Mr Wells would say,wondering still more, and still more vainly, when he enters London'scultured circles, from which he escapes through an obscure byway ofLeicester Square. And then again, in _Round the Corner_, it is, a verylittle, Mr Cannan in Manchester, incredulously examining, and throughSerge commenting upon the world. Were it not for _Devious Ways_ onewould be inclined to think that Mr Cannan had nothing to say exceptabout himself, and, indeed, it is disquieting to think that the bookwhich saves him from such a conclusion is inferior to his subjectivework. Still, it is not altogether a bad book; it is not the sort of bookwith which Mr Cannan will bid for fame, but it represents the streak ofdetachment which is essential if this author is to show himself able tostand outside his own canvas; moreover, in _Round the Corner_, Mr Cannanwas less limited by himself than he was in his previous books. Thepraise that has been showered on this novel was perfervid andindiscriminate; it was not sufficiently taken into account that thebook was congested, that the selection of details was not unerring, andthat the importation of such a character as Serge laid the author opento the imputation of having recently read _Sanin_; but, all this beingsaid, it is certain that _Round the Corner_, with its accuratecharacterisation, its atmospheric sense and its diversity, marked adefinite stage in the evolution of Mr Cannan. Though refusing to acceptit as work of the first rank, I agree that it is an evidence of MrCannan's ability to write work of the first rank: he may never write it,but this book is his qualification for entering the race. His laternovels, _Young Earnest_ and _Mendel_, have done him no good; they aretoo closely related to his own life; his private emotions are also tooactive in his pacifist skit, _Windmills_, which is inferior to _The Taleof a Tub_. Other novels, too, such as _Three Pretty Men_ and _The StuccoHouse_, exhibit painful superiority over the ordinary person; lackinghumour, it seems that Mr Cannan has taken himself too seriously, onemight almost say, too dramatically; those sufferings, misunderstandings,isolations, and struggles of his youth have been to him too vivid andtoo significant. For a long time his picture fogged his vision; he couldnot see himself for himself. But he may come to view more sanely theepic of his own life and more wholly the epic of the life of others. Ifhe will consent to be less the actor and more the spectator, he willprobably succeed in becoming the playwright.

  Mr Walpole does not, so definitely as Mr Cannan, view the world in termsof his own life, his personality is otherwise tinged: he is less angry,less chafed, and it may be that because he is of the softer Southernbreed, he has no share in the dour aggressiveness of Mr Cannan's Northcountry. And there is a variation in the self that Mr Walpole paints: itis not what he is, or even what he thinks he is, but what he would liketo be. In his chief work, by which is meant the most artistic, _MrPerrin and Mr Traill_, the writer shares with us much of the wistfulnesshe must have felt in his early manhood, but Mr Traill is not Mr Walpole;if he were, he would have recurred in other novels; he is the simple,delicate, and passionate young man (passionate, that is, in the modestEnglish way), that Mr Walpole would like to be. This we know because MrWalpole loves Traill and sees no weakness in him: now, one may love thatwhich one despises, but that which one admires one must love. No lovercan criticise his lady, if his lady she is to remain, and thus, in hisincapacity to see aught save charm in his hero, Mr Walpole indicates thedirection of his own desire. Yet, and strangely enough, in _The Preludeto Adventure_, there is a suggestion that Mr Walpole would gladly beDune, haughty and sombre; in _Fortitude_, that he would be PeterWestcott, have his fine courage, his delicacy and his faith. He asks toomuch in wishing to be Proteus, but, in so doing, he puts forward a claimto talent, for he tells us his aspiration rather than his realisation.Indeed, if it were not that _The Prelude to Adventure_ is so very muchhis life in Cambridge, _Mr Perrin and Mr Traill_ his career in a littleschool, _Fortitude_ his life under the influence of London'spersonality, he would not come into the class of those men who make copyof their past. And it is a feature of high redeeming value that in_Maradick at Forty_, he should have attempted to make copy of hisfuture, for, again, here is aspiration. Mr Walpole needs to increase hisdetachment and widen the fields which he surveys. Schools and Cambridge:these are tales of little boys and their keepers; literary London: thatis the grasshopper and its summer singing. He needs to develop, toembrace business and politics, the commonness of love, and the vitalroughness of the world. He has tried to do this in _The Dark Forest_,but this is so close a _pastiche_ of Russian novels that it cannot standfor Mr Walpole's emancipation.

  IV

  In Mr Beresford we discover a closer identity between the man and themask, though he has written several books where he does not figure, _TheHampdenshire Wonder_, the tale of an incredible child, _The House inDemetrius Road_, and _Goslings_, a fantastic commentary upon life. MrBeresford is more at his ease when he tells his own tale. In threebooks, _The Early History of Jacob Stahl_, _A Candidate for Truth_, and_The Invisible Event_, Mr Beresford has exploited himself with someeloquence; he has the sense of selection, he is not crabbed, and heinforms with fine passion those early years through which fleets a finewoman figure. In these books, as also in _Housemates_, Mr Beresfordshows that he knows love, and isolation, and pain: those other young menwith whom we are concerned feel these things, too, but hardly one sopassionately. Mr Beresford's merit is that he is more ordinary, thusthat he is less unreal than the passionate persons his rivals are orwould be. Yet, if this were all, it might not be enough, for a tale maybe told twice but not more often; if, in the first part of _Goslings_,Mr Beresford had not shown how closely and incisively he can picture thelower-middle class, analyse its ambitions, sympathise with its hopes,his would be a limited scope. I hope he will go further in thisdirection, extend his criticism of life through more of those people andmore of their fates, while he himself remains outside. He must choose:Jacob Stahl, that is Mr Beresford, is a charming creature whom one wouldgladly know; but Jasper Thrale, expounding the world, is not MrBeresford, for he is a prig. Mr Beresford may run on two lines: one forhimself alone, and one for the world as he sees it.

  Mr D. H. Lawrence's is not in the same class. Once only can he have beenautobiographical; either in _The White Peacock_, or in _Sons andLovers_, for he could evidently not have been, at the same time, thepoetic son of a collier and a cultured member of the well-to-do classesin a farming community. Probably it is an open secret that Mr Lawrenceis closer to the Nottingham collier than to the rustic who made haywhile others played Bach. But it does not matter very much whether he beone or the other; it is not his physical self he puts into his books,but the adventures of his temperament. It is a curious temperament, amixture of Northern brutality with wistful Northern melancholy. Hischaracters, and this applies to George and Lettice in _The WhitePeacock_, to Sigmund, in _The Trespasser_, to Paul Morel, Mrs Morel, andMiriam, in _Sons and Lovers_, are always battling with adversity for thesake of their fine hopes, are held up by their pride, and divorced alittle from commoner folk by the taste that takes them to Verlaine andLulli. If it is Mr Lawrence to whom every flower of the hedge and everyfeather of the strutting cock cries co
lour and passionate life, if it isfor him that the water-meadows are fragrant and the star-lit nightsendless deep, it is not for him that the characters live, but for us: hetakes his share, he leaves us ours; he inflames his characters, thenallows them to act. Indeed, if no fault were to be found with him onmere literary score, Mr Lawrence would be more than a man of promise: hewould have arrived. But his passion carries him away; he sees too much,shows too much, he analyses too fully, discovers too many elements. Itmay be urged that no artist can see or analyse too fully. But he can, ifhe discovers that which is not there. Mr Lawrence, having found gold inthe dross of common men and women, is inclined to infer that there istoo much gold in the vulgar. Being convinced of this, he becomes hectic;his people are as flames, feeding upon mortal bodies and burning themup. His peril is excessive sensation. He needs some better knowledge ofaffairs, more intercourse with the cruder rich, with the drabmiddle-class, so that his brilliant vision may by its dulling becometolerable to meaner eyes. He needs to discover those for whom music hathno charms, and yet are not base in attitude.

  Mr Lawrence, who exploits his life not over much, affords us a necessarytransition between those who are interested in little else and thesecond group, Mr Mackenzie, Mr Onions, and Mr Swinnerton, who have, withmore or less success, tried to stand back as they write. Of these, MrCompton Mackenzie is the most interesting because, in three volumes, hehas made three new departures: _The Passionate Elopement_, a tale ofpowder and patches; _Carnival_, a romance of the meaner parts of Londonand of Charing Cross Road, and lastly _Sinister Street_, where he linksup with those who exploit only their experiences. Evidently Mr Mackenziebelieves that a good terrier never shakes a rat twice. Had _SinisterStreet_ been his first contribution to literature, Mr Mackenzie wouldhave found his place indicated in the first group, but as he began bystanding outside himself it must be assumed that he thought it a pity tolet so much good copy go begging. He is a man difficult of assessmentbecause of his diversity. He has many graces of style, and a capacitywhich may be dangerous of infusing charm into that which has no charm.He almost makes us forget that the heroine of _Carnival_ is a vulgarlittle Cockney, by tempting us to believe that it might have beenotherwise with her. There is a cheapness of sentiment about this Jenny,this Islington columbine, but we must not reproach Mr Mackenzie forloving his heroine over-much: too many of his rivals are not lovingtheirs enough. Indeed, his chief merit is that he finds the beautifuland the lovable more readily than the hideous. His figures can serve asreagents against the ugly heroine and the scamp hero who grewfashionable twenty years ago. His success, if it comes at all, will bedue to his executive rather than to his artistic quality, for he oftenfails to sift his details. In _Sinister Street_, we endure a greatcongestion of word and interminable catalogues of facts and things. Ifhe has a temperament at all, which I believe, it is stifled by themantle in which he clothes it. It is not that Mr Mackenzie knows toomuch about his characters, for that is not possible, but he tells us toomuch. He does not give our imagination a chance to work. His romanticearnestness, as shown in _Guy and Pauline_, is unrelieved by humour andmakes those details wearisome. Yet, his hat is in the ring. If he canprune his efflorescent periods and select among his details he may, byforce of charm, attain much further than his fellows. He will have toinclude just those things and no others which can give us an illusion ofthe world.

  V

  In direct opposition to Mr Mackenzie, we find Mr Onions. While MrMackenzie gives us too much and allows us to give nothing, Mr Onionsgives us hardly anything and expects us to write his novel for him as weread it. There are two strands in his work, one of them fantastic andcritical, the other creative. Of the first class are the tales of_Widdershins_, and _The Two Kisses_, a skit on studios andboarding-houses. Even slightly more massive works, such as the love epicof advertisement, _Good Boy Seldom_, and the fierce revelation ofdisappointment which is in _Little Devil Doubt_ do not quite come intothe second class; they are not the stones on which Mr Onions is tobuild. They are a destructive criticism of modern life, and criticism,unless it is creative, is a thing of the day, however brilliant it mayseem. Mr Oliver Onions can be judged only on his trilogy, _In Accordancewith the Evidence_, _The Debit Account_, and _The Story of Louie_, forthese are creative works, threaded and connected; they are an attemptand, on the whole, a very successful one, to take a section of life andto view it from different angles. If the attempt has not completelysucceeded, it is perhaps because it was too much. It rests upon closecharacterisation, a sense of the iron logic of facts and uponatmospheric quality. There is not a young man, and for the matter ofthat an old one, more than Mr Onions, capable of anatomical psychology.There may be autobiography in some of Mr Onions's work, but there is inhis trilogy no more than should colour any man's book.

  Yet Mr Onions has his devil, and it takes the form of a rage against theworld, of a hatred that seems to shed a bilious light over his puppets.His strong men are hard, almost brutal, inconsiderate, dominant only bydint of intellect, and arrogant in their dominance; his weak men arecraven, lying, incapable of sweetness; even strong Louie is so haughtyas almost to be rude. All this appears in the very style, so much sothat, were it not for the cliche, I would quote Buffon. The sentencesare tortured as if born in agony; the highly selected detail isreluctant, avaricious, as if Mr Onions hated giving the world anything.And yet, all this culminates in an impression of power: Mr Onions is thereticent man whose confidence, when earned, is priceless. He lays nopearls before us; he holds them in his half-extended hand for us to takeif we can. Some tenderness; some belief that men can be gentle and womensweet; a little more hope and some pity, and Mr Onions will be judgedmore fairly.

  Of Mr Swinnerton, who also stands outside his canvas, one is not sosure. He made, in _The Casement_, an elusive picture of the life of thewell-to-do when confronted with the realities of life, but did notsucceed emphatically enough in the more ponderous effort entitled _TheHappy Family_. There he was too uniform, too mechanical, and rather toomuch bound by literary traditions. He was so bound also in his brilliant_Nocturne_, the tragedy of five creatures within a single night. But MrSwinnerton has a point of view, an attitude toward life; I could notdefine it, but am conscious of its existence, and in a man of promisethat is quite enough. For a man with an individual attitude will make itfelt if he has the weapons of style with which to express it. Now MrSwinnerton shows great dexterity in the use of words, felicity ofphrase, a discrimination in the choice of details which will enable himto embody such ideas as he may later on conceive. He has only to fearthat he may be mistaken as to the size of his ideas; like Mr Hugh deSelincourt, he may be too much inclined to take as the plot of a novelan idea and a story in themselves too slender. Under modern publishingconditions he may be compelled to spin out his work: as his tendency isto concentrate, he may find himself so much hampered as to lose thechief charm of his writing, viz., balance. He has shown charm in_Nocturne_, some power in _The Happy Family_; these two qualities needblending, so that Mr Swinnerton be no longer two men, but one.

  Brief mention must be made of Mr Perceval Gibbon. Of his novels, oneonly, _Souls in Bondage_, showed remarkable promise, but his later workwith the exception of a few short stories, was disappointing. In thatbook there was colour, atmosphere, characterisation and technique, butthere was also passion. The passion was not maintained in later years.Other qualities were still there: he knows how to express the dustyglare or the dank warmth of the tropics, the languor, veiling fire, ofits men and women, but the vision is a little exterior. Mr Gibbon needsto state his point of view, if he has one, to let us see more clearlyhow he himself stands in relation to the world. This does not apply toMr de Selincourt, somewhat afflicted with moral superciliousness, whosepoint of view is one of aloof vigour. To a great charm of style he addsselectiveness; in _A Daughter of the Morning_, the characterisation isinwrought, just as in _A Boy's Marriage_ it is passionate. And againthere is Mr C. E. Montague, all bathed in the glamour of GeorgeMeredith and Mr Henry James.
Of these Mr de Selincourt is by far themost interesting; he has elected to depict not the people who live ill,but those whom he conceives as living well, proud of their body,responsible to their instincts. In _A Soldier of Life_, notably, hemakes almost credible the regeneration of the 'ordinary' man. Still,they are difficult to classify, these three; to reject their candidaturemay be too much, so fine are their qualities; and yet, to inscribe themupon the roll may be undue, for they have not the raw massiveness, theair that one wants to find in boys, about to be men; they are tooparticular, too much inclined to look away from the world and toconcentrate on some microscopic section. To enlarge without loosening isno easy matter.

  Lastly, and by himself, there is Mr E. M. Forster, who has beenforgotten a little in a hurry, because he has not, since 1910, feltinclined to publish a novel; he is still one of the young men, while itis not at all certain that he is not 'the' young man. Autobiography hashad its way with him, a little in _A Room With a View_, and very muchmore in that tale of schoolmasters, _The Longest Journey_; but it was_Howard's End_, that much criticised work, which achieved thedistinction of being popular, though of high merit. This marks out MrForster and makes it likely that he can climb Parnassus if he chooses.In _Howard's End_ Mr Forster surveyed the world in particular and alsoin general; he was together local and cosmic; he was conscious of thelittle agitations and artificialities of the cultured, of the upthrustof the untaught and of the complacent strength of those who rule. Overall, hung his own self as the wings of a roc darkening the countryside.It is because Mr Forster has seized a portion of the world and welded itwith himself that the essence of him may persist and animate otherworlds. His attitude is one of tolerance; he prays that we may not drifttoo far from the pride of body which is the pride of spirit. Mysticathleticism: that seems to be Mr Forster's message; as it is essentialthat the man of to-morrow should be a man of ideas as well as a man ofperceptions, it is quite certain that, if Mr Forster chooses to returnto the field, he will establish his claim.

  One word as to women. The time has gone when we discriminated betweenthe work of women and of men; to-day, 'Lucas Malet,' Miss May Sinclair,Mrs Sedgwick, Mrs Edith Wharton, Miss Violet Hunt, Miss Ethel Sidgwick,Mrs Belloc-Lowndes, and Mrs Dudeney, must take their chance in the roughand tumble of literary criticism, and the writer does not suggest acomparison between them and the leading men. For this there is a verygood reason: the young women of to-day are promising work of an entirelynew kind. They have less style than their precursors and more ideas:such women writers as Miss Amber Reeves,[3] Miss Viola Meynell, MissSheila Kaye-Smith,[4] Miss Tennyson Jesse, Miss Dorothy Richardson, MissKatherine Gerould, Miss Bridget MacLagan have produced so far, verylittle; they can be indicated as candidates, but much more faintly thantheir masculine rivals. They write less, and less easily; they areyounger at their trade, more erratic. It is enough to mention them, andto say that, so far as women are showing indications of approximating tomen in literary quality, these are the women who are likely soon tobear the standards of their sex.

  [Footnote 3: See Special Chapter.]

  [Footnote 4: _Ibid._]

  To sum up, I suggest that the rough classification of the seven youngmen must not be taken as fixed. Some are more autobiographic thanevocative; some are receptive rather than personally active, and yetothers have not chosen between the two roads. Yet, taking them as awhole, with the reservation of possible dark horses, these are probablythe men among whom will be found the two or three who will 'somehow,' inanother ten years, lead English letters. It will be an indefinable'somehow,' a compound of intellectual dominance and emotional sway. Weshall not have a Bennett for a Bennett, nor a Wells for a Wells, butequivalents of power, and equivalents of significance, who will beintimately in tune with their time and better than any will express it.