A Novelist on Novels Read online

  Three Young Novelists

  1. MR D. H. LAWRENCE

  It is not a very long time ago since Professor Osler startled Americaand England by proclaiming that a man was too old at forty. This is notgenerally held, though, I suppose, most of us will accept that one istoo old to begin at forty. But that is not the end: very soon, inliterature at least, it may be too late to begin at thirty, if we are totake into account the achievements of the young men, of whom Mr D. H.Lawrence is one of the youngest. Mr Lawrence is certainly one of theyoung men, not a member of a school, for they have no formal school, andcan have none if they are of any value, but a partner in theirtendencies and an exponent of their outlook. He has all the unrulinessof the small group that is rising up against the threatening State, itsrules and its conventions, proclaiming the right of the individual todo much more than live--namely, to live splendidly.

  It is this link makes Mr Lawrence so interesting; this fact that, likethem, he is so very much of his time, so hot, controversial, uneasy;that, like them, he has the sudden fury of the bird that beats againstthe bars of its cage. But while the young men sneer at society, at thefamily, at every institution, Mr Lawrence tends to accept these things;he has no plan of reform, no magic wand with which to transmute theworld into fairyland: he claims only as a right to develop hisindividuality, and to see others develop theirs, within a system whichtortures him as another Cardinal La Balue.

  This it is differentiates him from so many of his rivals. He has in hismind no organisations; he is mainly passionate aspiration and passionateprotest. And that is not wonderful when we consider who he is.Surprising to think, this prominent young novelist is only thirty-four.Son of a Nottinghamshire coal-miner, a Board-school boy, his earlycareer seems to have been undistinguished: a county council scholarshipmade of him a school teacher, imparting knowledge in the midst ofold-fashioned chaos in a room containing several classes. Then anotherscholarship, two years at college, and Mr Lawrence went to Croydon toteach for less than L2 a week. Then the literary life, though I extractfrom his record the delightful fact that at college they gave him prizesfor history and chemistry, but placed him very low in the English class.(This is rather embarrassing for those who believe in the publicendowment of genius.)

  I have said 'then the literary life,' but I was wrong, for already attwenty-one Mr Lawrence had begun _The White Peacock_, of which, year byyear, and he confesses often during lectures, he was laying thefoundations. Mr Lawrence did not, as do so many of us, enter theliterary life at a given moment: literature grew in him and with him,was always with him, even in the worst years of his delicate health. Ifliterature was not his passion, it was to his passion what the tongue isto speech: the essential medium of his expression.

  Sometimes when reading one of his works, I wonder whether Mr Lawrencehas not mistaken his medium, and whether it is not a painter he oughtto have been, so significant is for him the slaty opalescence of theheron's wing and so rutilant the death of the sun. When he paints thecountryside, sometimes in his simplicity he is almost Virgilian, butmore often he is a Virgil somehow strayed into Capua and intoxicatedwith its wines. All through his novels runs this passionate streak, thisvision of nature in relation to himself. But it is certainly in _TheWhite Peacock_ that this sensation attains its apogee. It is not a storywhich one can condense. Strictly, it is not a story at all. It presentsto us a group of well-to-do people, cultured, and yet high in emotionaltone.

  Mr Lawrence himself, who figures in it, is effaced; Lettice, wayward andbeautiful, is the fragrance of sex, but not more so than the honeysucklein the hedges; George, muscles rippling under his skin, insensitive tocruelty, yet curiously moved by delicacy, is the brother of the bulls heherds; and all the others, the fine gentlemen, the laughing girls,farmers, school teachers, making hay, making music, making jokes,walking in the spangled meadows, and living, and wedding, and dying, allof them come to no resolution. Their lives have no beginning and noend. Mr Lawrence looks: Pippa passes. It is almost impossible tocriticise _The White Peacock_, and the danger in an appreciation is thatone should say too much good of it, for the book yields just the qualityof illusion that a novel should give us, which does not of itselfjustify the critic in saying that it is a great book. For the novel,equally with the picture, can never reproduce life; it can only suggestit, and when it does suggest it, however peculiarly or partially, one isinclined to exaggerate the impression one has received and to refrainfrom considering whether it is a true impression. It is the vividness ofMr Lawrence's nature-vision carries us away; such phrases as thesedeceive us: 'The earth was red and warm, pricked with the dark,succulent green of bluebell sheaths, and embroidered with gray-greenclusters of spears, and many white flowerets. High above, above thelight tracery of hazel, the weird oaks tangled in the sunset. Below inthe first shadows drooped hosts of little white flowers, so silent andsad, it seemed like a holy communion of pure wild things, numberless,frail and folded meekly in the evening light.' They deceive us becauseMr Lawrence's realisation of man is less assured than his realisation ofnature. I doubt the quality of his people's culture, the spontaneity oftheir attitude towards the fields in which they breathe; theirspontaneity seems almost artificial.

  That impression Mr Lawrence always gives; he sees the world through amagnifying-glass, and perhaps more so in _Sons and Lovers_ than in _TheWhite Peacock_. In that book he gives us unabashed autobiography--thestory of his early youth, of his relation to his mother, a creature offitful, delicate charm. Mrs Morel is very Northern; she has, with theharshness of her latitude, its fine courage and its ambition; PaulMorel, the hero, is Mr Lawrence himself, the little blue flower on theclinker heap. And those other folk about him, dark Miriam, slowlybrooding over him; her rival, that conquering captive of sex; thebrothers, the sisters, and the friends; this intense society is vitaland yet undefinably exaggerated. Perhaps not so undefinably, for I amoppressed by unbelief when I find this grouping of agriculturists andcolliers responding to the verse of Swinburne and Verlaine, to Italian,to Wagner, to Bach. I cannot believe in the spinet at the pit's mouth.And yet all this, Mr Lawrence tells us, is true! Well, it is true, butit is not general, and that is what impairs the value of Mr Lawrence'svisions. Because a thing is, he believes that it is; when a thing is, itmay only be accidental; it may be particular. Now one might discuss atlength whether a novelist should concentrate on the general or on theparticular, whether he should use the microscope or the aplanetic lense,and many champions will be found in the field. I will not attempt todecide whether he should wish, as Mr Wells, to figure all the world, oras Mr Bennett, to take a section; probably the ideal is the mean. Butdoubtless the novelist should select among the particular that which hasan application to the general, and it may safely be said that, if MrLawrence errs at all, it is in selecting such particular as has notinvariably a universal application.

  Mr Lawrence lays himself open to this criticism in a work such as _Sonsand Lovers_, because it has a conscious general scope, but in _TheTrespasser_ his conception is of a lesser compass. The book holds a moreminute psychological intention. That Sigmund should leave his wife foranother love and find himself driven to his death by an intolerableconflict between his desire, the love he bears his children, and theconsciousness of his outlawry, should have made a great book. But thisone of Mr Lawrence's novels fails because the author needs a wide spherewithin which the particular can evolve; he is clamouring within thenarrow limits of his incident; Sigmund appears small and weak;unredeemed by even a flash of heroism; his discontented wife, herself-righteous child hold their own views, and not enough those of theworld which contains them. An amazing charge to make against a novelist,that his persons are too much persons! But persons must partly be types,or else they become monsters.

  It would be very surprising if Mr Lawrence were not a poet in verse aswell as in prose, if he did not sing when addressing his love:--

  'Coiffing up your auburn hair In a Puritan fillet, a chaste white snare To catch and keep me with you
there So far away.'

  But a poet he is much more than a rebel, and that distinguishes him fromthe realists who have won fame by seeing the dunghill very well, andnot at all the spreading chestnut-tree above. Though he select from theworld, he is greedy for its beauty, so greedy that from all it has togive, flower, beast, woman, he begs more:--

  'You, Helen, who see the stars As mistletoe berries burning in a black tree, You surely, seeing I am a bowl of kisses, Should put your mouth to mine and drink of me,'

  'Helen, you let my kisses steam Wasteful into the night's black nostrils; drink Me up, I pray; oh, you who are Night's Bacchante, How can you from my bowl of kisses shrink!'

  I cannot, having no faith in my power to judge poetry, proclaim MrLawrence to Parnassus, but I doubt whether such cries as these, where anurgent wistfulness mingles in tender neighbourhood with joy and paintogether coupled, can remain unheard.

  And so it seems strange to find in Mr Lawrence activities alien alittle to such verses as these, to have to say that he is also anauthoritative critic of German literature, and the author of a prosedrama of colliery life. More gladly would I think of him always asremote from the stirrings of common men, forging and nursing his dreams.For dreams they are, and they will menace the realities of his future ifhe cannot 'breathe upon his star and detach its wings.' It is not onlythe dragon of autobiography that threatens him. It is true that so farhe has written mainly of himself, of the world in intimate relation withhimself, for that every writer must do a little; but he has followed hislife so very closely, so often photographed his own emotions, thatunless life holds for him many more adventures, and unless he can retainthe power to give minor incident individual quality, he may find himselfwritten out. For Mr Lawrence has not what is called ideas. He isstimulated by the eternal rather than by the fugitive; the fact of theday has little significance for him; thus, if he does not renew himselfhe may become monotonous, or he may cede to his more dangerous tendencyto emphasise overmuch. He may develop his illusion of culture among thevulgar until it is incredible; he may be seduced by the love he bearsnature and its throbbings into allowing his art to dominate him. Alreadyhis form is often turgid, amenable to no discipline, tends to lead himastray. He sees too much, feels significances greater than the actual;with arms that are too short, because only human, he strives to embracethe soul of man. This is exemplified in his last novel, _The Rainbow_,of which little need be said, partly because it has been suppressed, andmainly because it is a bad book. It is the story of several generationsof people so excessive sexually as to seem repulsive. With dreadfulmonotony the women exhibit riotous desire, the men slow cruelty, uglysensuality; they come together in the illusion of love and clasp hatredwithin their joined arms. As in _Sons and Lovers_, but with greaterexaggeration, Mr Lawrence detects hate in love, which is not hisinvention, but he magnifies it into untruth. His intensity of feelinghas run away with him, caused him to make particular people intomonsters that mean as little to us, so sensually crude, so flimsilyphilosophical are they, as any Medusa, Medea, or Klytemnestra. _TheRainbow_, as also some of Mr Lawrence's verse, is the fruit of personalangers and hatreds; it was born in one of his bad periods from which hemust soon rescue himself. If he cannot, then the early hopes he arousedcannot endure and he must sink into literary neurasthenia.

  2. AMBER REEVES

  'I don't agree with you at all.' As she spoke I felt that Miss AmberReeves would have greeted as defiantly the converse of my proposition.She stood in a large garden on Campden Hill, where an at-home wasproceeding, her effect heightened by Mr Ford Madox Hueffer's wearypolish, and the burning twilight of Miss May Sinclair. Not far off MrWyndham Lewis was languid and Mr Gilbert Cannan eloquently silent. MissViolet Hunt, rather mischievous, talked to Mr Edgar Jepson, whoobviously lay in ambush, preparing to slay an idealist, presumably SirRabindrahath Tagore. I felt very mild near this young lady, so dark inthe white frock of simplicity or artifice, with broad cheeks thatrecalled the rattlesnake, soft cheeks tinted rather like a tea rose,with long, dark eyes, wicked, aggressive, and yet laughing. I felt veryold--well over thirty. For Miss Reeves had just come down from Newnham,and, indeed, that afternoon she was still coming down ... on a toboggan.When I met her the other day she said: 'Well, perhaps you are right.'It's queer how one changes!

  She was about twenty-three, and that is not so long ago; she was stillthe child who has been 'brought up pious,' attended Sunday School andfelt a peculiar property in God. Daughter of a New Zealand CabinetMinister and of a mother so rich in energy that she turned to suffragethe scholarly Mr Pember Reeves, Miss Amber Reeves was a spoilt child.She was also the child of a principle, had been sent to Kensington HighSchool to learn to be democratic and meet the butcher's daughter. Shehad been to Newnham too, taken up socialism, climbed a drain pipe andbeen occasionally sought in marriage. At ten she had written poems andplays, then fortunately gave up literature and, as a sponge flung intothe river of life, took in people as they were, arrived at the maximthat things do not matter but only the people who do them. A lastattempt to organise her took place in the London School of Economics,where she was to write a thesis; one sometimes suspects that she nevergot over it.

  This is not quite just, for she is changed. Not hostile now, butunderstanding, interested in peculiarities as a magpie collectingspoons. Without much illusion, though; her novels are the work of afaintly cynical Mark Tapley.

  She is driven to mimic the ordinary people whom she cannot help loving,who are not as herself, yet whom she forgives because they amuse her.She is still the rattlesnake of gold and rose, but (zoologicaloriginality) one thinks also of an Italian greyhound with folded paws,or a furred creature of the bush that lurks and watches with eyesmischievous rather than cruel.

  On reading this over again I discover that she has got over the LondonSchool of Economics, though her first two books showed heavy the brandof Clare Market. Miss Amber Reeves started out to do good, but hasfortunately repented. She has not written many novels, only three infive years, an enviable record, and they were good novels, with faultsthat are not those of Mrs Barclay or of Mr Hall Caine. Over everychapter the Blue Book hovered. Her first novel, _The Reward of Virtue_,exhibited the profound hopelessness of youth. For Evelyn Baker, daughterof a mother who was glad she was a girl because 'girls are so mucheasier,' was doomed to lead the stupid life. Plump, handsome, fond ofpink, she lived in Notting Hill, went to dances, loved the artist andmarried the merchant, knew she did not love the merchant and went onliving with him; she took to good works, grew tired of them, and gavebirth to a girl child, thanking fate because 'girls are so much easier.'The story of Evelyn is so much the story of everybody that it seemsdifficult to believe it is the story of anybody. But it is. _The Rewardof Virtue_ is a remarkable piece of realism, and it is evidence of tastein a first novel to choose a stupid heroine, and not one who playsVincent d'Indy and marries somebody called Hugo.

  In that book Miss Amber Reeves indicated accomplishment, but this wasrather slight; only in her second novel, _A Lady and Her Husband_, wasshe to develop her highest quality: the understanding of the ordinaryman. (All young women novelists understand the artist, or nobody does;the man they seldom understand is the one who spends fifty yearssuccessfully paying bills.) The ordinary man is Mr Heyham, who runs teashops and easily controls a handsome wife of forty-five, while he failsto control Fabian daughters and a painfully educated son. He runs histea shops for profit, while Mrs Heyham comes to the unexpected view thathe should run them for the good of his girls. There is a revolution inHampstead when she discovers that Mr Heyham does not, for the girls aresweated; worse still, she sees that to pay them better will not helpmuch, for extra wages will not mean more food but only more hats. Theyare all vivid, the hard, lucid daughters, the soft and illogical MrsHeyham, and especially Mr Heyham, kindly, loving, generous, yet capableof every beastliness while maintaining his faith in his own rectitude.Mr Heyham is a triumph, for he is just everybody; he is 'the man withwhose experience
s women are trained to sympathise while he is nottrained to sympathise with theirs.' He is the ordinary, desirous man,the male. Listen to this analysis of man: 'He has a need to impresshimself on the world he finds outside him, an impulse that drives him toachieve his ends recklessly, ruthlessly, through any depth of sufferingand conflict ... it is just by means of the qualities that are often soirritating, their tiresome restlessness, their curiosity, theirdisregard for security, for seemliness, even for life itself, that menhave mastered the world and filled it with the wealth of civilisation.It is after this foolish, disorganised fashion of theirs, each ofthem--difficult, touchy creatures--busy with his personal ambitions,that they have armed the race with science, dignified it with art--onecan take men lightly but one cannot take lightly the things that menhave done.'

  That sort of man sweats his waitresses because such is his duty to theshareholders. It is in this sort of man, Mr Heyham, who wants moremoney, in Edward Day, the prig who hates spending it, that Miss AmberReeves realises herself. Analysis rather than evocation is her mission;she does not as a rule seek beauty, and when she strives, as in her lastnovel, _Helen in Love_, where a cheap little minx is kissed on thebeach and is thus inspired, Miss Amber Reeves fails to achieve beauty inpeople; she achieves principally affectation. Beauty is not her_metier_; irony and pity are nearer to her, which is not so bad if wereflect that such is the motto of Anatole France. Oh! she is no mockingliterary sprite, as the Frenchman, nor has she his graces; she issomewhat tainted by the seriousness of life, but she has this todistinguish her from her fellows: she can achieve laughter withouthatred.

  One should not, however, dismiss in a few words this latest novel. Onecan disregard the excellent picture of the lower-middle class familyfrom which Helen springs, its circumscribed nastiness, its vulgarpleasure in appearances, for Miss Amber Reeves has done as good workbefore. But one must observe her new impulse towards the rich, idle,cultured people, whom she idealises so that they appear as wornornaments of silver-gilt. It seems that she is reacting againstindignation, that she is turning away from social reform towards thecaste that has achieved a corner in graces. It may be that she has cometo think the world incurable and wishes to retire as an anchorite ...only she retires to Capua: this is not good, for any withdrawal into aselected atmosphere implies that criticism of this atmosphere issuspended. Nothing so swiftly as that kills virility in literature.

  But even so Miss Amber Reeves distinguishes herself from her immediaterivals, Miss Viola Meynell, Miss Bridget Maclagan, Miss SheilaKaye-Smith, Miss Katherine Gerould, by an interest in business and inpolitics. She really knows what is a limited liability company or anissue warrant. She is not restricted to love, but embraces such problemsas money, rank, science, class habits, which serve or destroy love. Shefinds her way in the modern tangle where emotion and cupidity trundletogether on a dusty road. She is not always just, but she is usuallyjudicial. Her men are rather gross instead of strong; she likes them,she tolerates them, they are altogether brutes and 'poor dears.' Butthen we are most of us a little like that.

  3. SHEILA KAYE-SMITH

  I do not know whether this is a compliment, but I should not besurprised if a reader of, say, _Starbrace_ or _Sussex Gorse_, were tothink that Sheila Kaye-Smith is the pen-name of a man. Just as onesuspects those racy tales of guardsmen, signed 'Joseph Brown' or 'GeorgeKerr,' of originating from some scented boudoir, so does one hesitatebefore the virility, the cognisance of oath and beer, of rotating crop,sweating horse, account book, vote and snickersnee that SheilaKaye-Smith exhibits in all her novels. This is broader, deeper than thework of the women novelists of to-day, who, with the exception of AmberReeves, are confined in a circle of eternally compounding pallid orpurple loves. One side of her work, notably, surprises, and that is thedirection of her thoughts away from women, their great and littlegriefs, towards men and the glory of their combat against fate. SheilaKaye-Smith is more than any of her rivals the true novelist: the showmanof life.

  Yet she is a woman. You will imagine her as seeming small, but not so;very thin, with a grace all made of quiescence, her eyes gray andretracted a little, as if always in pain because man is not so beautifulas the earth that bore him, because he fails in idealism, falls awayfrom his hopes and cannot march but only shamble from one eternity intoanother. There is in her a sort of cosmic choler restrained by a Kelticpride that is ready to pretend a world made up of rates and taxes andthe 9.2 train to London Bridge. Afire within, she will not allow herselfto 'commit melodrama.' In _Isle of Thorns_ her heroine, Sally Odiarne,so describes her attempt to murder her lover, and I like to think ofSheila Kaye-Smith's will leashing the passion that strains. I like evenmore to think of the same will giving rein to anger, of a converse cry:'Commit melodrama! I jolly well shall! I'm justabout sick of things!'

  'Justabout!' That word, free-scattered in the speech of her rustics, isall Sussex. For Sheila Kaye-Smith has given expression to the countythat from the Weald spreads green-breasted to meet the green sea. In allthe novels is the slow Sussex speech, dotted with the kindly 'surelye,'the superlative 'unaccountable'; women are 'praaper,' ladies 'valiant,'troubles 'tedious.' It has colour, it is true English, unstained ofCockneyism and American. It is the speech of the oasthouse, of thecottage on the marsh, of the forester's hut in Udimore Wood, where singsthe lark and rivulets flow like needles through the moss.

  _Assez de litterature!_ Sheila Kaye-Smith is not a painter, even thoughwith dew diamonds the thorn-bush she spangle. Her Sussex is male: it isnot the dessicated Sussex of the modern novelist, but the Sussex of thesmuggler, of the Methodist, the squire; the Sussex where men sweat, andread no books. Old Sussex, and the Sussex of to-day which some think wascreated by the L.B. & S.C. Railway, she loves them both, and in both hasfound consolation, but I think she loves best the old. It was old Sussexmade her first novel, _The Tramping Methodist_. Old Sussex bred itshero, Humphrey Lyte. He was a picaresque hero, the young rebel, for hegrew enmeshed in murder and in love, in the toils of what England calledjustice in days when the Regent went to Brighton. But Lyte does notreveal Sheila Kaye-Smith as does _Starbrace_. Here is the apologia forthe rebel: Starbrace, the son of a poor and disgraced man, will not eatthe bread of slavery at his grandfather's price. You will imagine theold man confronted with this boy, of gentle blood but brought up as alabourer's son, hot, unruly, lusting for the freedom of the wet earth.Starbrace is a fool; disobedient he is to be flogged. He escapes amongthe smugglers on Winchelsea marsh, to the wild world of themid-eighteenth century. It is a world of fighting, and of riding, ofblood, of excisemen, of the 'rum pads' and their mistresses, theirdicing and their death. Despite his beloved, Theodora Straightway, ladywho fain would have him gentleman, Starbrace must ride away upon hispanting horse, Pharisee. Love as he may, he cannot live like a rabbit ina hutch; he must have danger, be taken, cast into a cell, be released todie by the side of Pharisee, charging the Pretender's bodyguard atPrestonpans. All this is fine, for she has the secret of the historicalnovel: to show not the things that have changed, but those which havenot.

  _Starbrace_ is, perhaps, Sheila Kaye-Smith's most brilliant flight, butnot her most sustained. She has had other adventures in literature, suchas _Isle of Thorns_, where Sally Odiarne wanders with Stanger'stravelling show, hopelessly entangled in her loves, unable to seizehappiness, unable to give herself to the tender Raphael, bound togood-tempered, sensual Andy, until at last she must kill Andy to getfree, kill him to escape to the sea and die. But she finds God:--

  'She had come out to seek death, and had found life. Who can stand against life, the green sea that tumbles round one's limbs and tears up like matchwood the breakwaters one has built? There, kneeling in the surf and spray, Sally surrendered to life.'

  Sheila Kaye-Smith has not surrendered to life, though the weakness ofher may be found in another book, _Three Against the World_, where theworthless Furlonger family can but writhe as worms drying in the sun; inthe tired flatness of her last work, _The Challenge to Sirius_.
Thevagary of her mind is in such work as criticism: she has published astudy of John Galsworthy which is judicial, though not inspired. Butshe was destined for finer tasks. Already in _Spell Land_, the story ofa Sussex farm where lived two people, driven out of the village becausethey loved unwed, she had given a hint of her power to see not only manbut the earth. She has almost stated herself in _Sussex Gorse_.

  I have read many reviews of this book. I am tired of being told it is'epic.' It is not quite; it has all the grace that Zola lacked in _LaTerre_, but if the beauty is anything it is Virgilian, not Homeric. Thescheme is immense, the life of Reuben Backfield, of Odiam, inspired inearly youth with the determination to possess Boarzell, the common grownwith gorse and firs, the fierce land of marl and shards where naughtsave gorse could live. The opening is a riot, for the Enclosures Act isin force and the squire is seizing the people's land. In that moment isborn Reuben's desire; Boarzell shall be his. He buys some acres and hisstruggle is frightful; you see his muscles bulging in his blue shirt,you smell his sweat, you hear the ploughshare gripped with the stones,teeth biting teeth. For Boarzell Common is old, crafty, and savage, andwould foil man. Reuben is not foiled; he can bear all things, so candare all things. He buys more land; there shall be on his farm nopleasure so that he may have money to crush Boarzell. His brother,Harry, is struck while Reuben blows up the enemy trees, and haunts hislife, a horrible, idiot figure; his wife, Naomi, ground down by forcedchild-bearing (for Boarzell needs men and Reuben sons) dies. His sixsons, devoid of the money Boarzell takes, leave him; one becomes athief, another a sailor, another a sot in London, another a success; allleave him, even his daughters; one to marry a hated rival farmer, one tolove because Reuben forbade love, and to end on the streets. He losesall, he loses his pretty second wife, he loses Alice Jury whom alone heloved, he loses the sons that Rose gave him. He gives all to Boarzell,to fighting it for seventy years, sometimes victor, sometimes crushed,for Boarzell is evil and fierce:

  'It lay in a great hush, a great solitude, a quiet beast of power and mystery. It seemed to call to him through the twilight like a love forsaken. There it lay: Boarzell--strong, beautiful, desired, untamed, still his hope, still his battle.'

  There are faults, here and there, degraded cliches; Sheila Kaye-Smithloves the stars too well, and often indulges in horrid astronomicorgies; there is not enough actual combat with the earth; the authorintervenes, points to the combat instead of leaving at grips the twobeasts, Reuben and Boarzell. She has not quite touched the epic, yetmakes us want to resemble the hero, fierce, cruel, but great when oldand alone, still indomitable. And one wonders what she will do, what shewill be. There are lines in her poems, _Willow's Forge_, that prophesy;the moment may be enough:--

  'When the last constellations faint and fall, When the last planets burst in fiery foam, When all the winds have sunk asleep, when all The worn way-weary comets have come home-- When past and present and the future flee, My moment lives!'

  She may strive no more, as she proposes to the seeker in _The Counsel ofGilgamesh_:--

  'Why wander round Gilgamesh? Why vainly wander round? What canst thou find, O seeker, Which hath not long been found?

  What canst thou know, O scholar, Which hath not long been known? What canst thou have, O spoiler, Which dead men did not own?'

  But I do not think so. I do not know whether she will be great. It isenough that to-day she is already alone.