It is not a very long time ago since Professor Osler startled America and England by proclaiming that a man was too old at forty. This is not generally held, though, I suppose, most of us will accept that one is too old to begin at forty. But that is not the end: very soon, in literature at least, it may be too late to begin at thirty, if we are to take 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 the young men, not a member of a school, for they have no formal school, and can have none if they are of any value, but a partner in their tendencies and an exponent of their outlook. He has all the unruliness of the small group that is rising up against the threatening State, its rules and its conventions, proclaiming the right of the individual to do much more than live—namely, to live splendidly.

It is this link makes Mr Lawrence so interesting; this fact that, like them, 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 against the bars of its cage. But while the young men sneer at society, at the family, at every institution, Mr Lawrence tends to accept these things; he has no plan of reform, no magic wand with which to transmute the world into fairyland: he claims only as a right to develop his individuality, and to see others develop theirs, within a system which tortures him as another Cardinal La Balue.

This it is differentiates him from so many of his rivals. He has in his mind no organisations; he is mainly passionate aspiration and passionate protest. 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 early career seems to have been undistinguished: a county council scholarship made of him a school teacher, imparting knowledge in the midst of old-fashioned chaos in a room containing several classes. Then another scholarship, two years at college, and Mr Lawrence went to Croydon to teach for less than £2 a week. Then the literary life, though I extract from his record the delightful fact that at college they gave him prizes for history and chemistry, but placed him very low in the English class. (This is rather embarrassing for those who believe in the public endowment of genius.)

I have said 'then the literary life,' but I was wrong, for already at twenty-one Mr Lawrence had begun The White Peacock, of which, year by year, and he confesses often during lectures, he was laying the foundations. Mr Lawrence did not, as do so many of us, enter the literary 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. If literature was not his passion, it was to his passion what the tongue is to speech: the essential medium of his expression.

Sometimes when reading one of his works, I wonder whether Mr Lawrence has not mistaken his medium, and whether it is not a painter he ought to have been, so significant is for him the slaty opalescence of the heron's wing and so rutilant the death of the sun. When he paints the countryside, sometimes in his simplicity he is almost Virgilian, but more often he is a Virgil somehow strayed into Capua and intoxicated with its wines. All through his novels runs this passionate streak, this vision of nature in relation to himself. But it is certainly in The White Peacock that this sensation attains its apogee. It is not a story which one can condense. Strictly, it is not a story at all. It presents to us a group of well-to-do people, cultured, and yet high in emotional tone.

Mr Lawrence himself, who figures in it, is effaced; Lettice, wayward and beautiful, is the fragrance of sex, but not more so than the honeysuckle in the hedges; George, muscles rippling under his skin, insensitive to cruelty, yet curiously moved by delicacy, is the brother of the bulls he herds; 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, all of them come to no resolution. Their lives have no beginning and no end. Mr Lawrence looks: Pippa passes. It is almost impossible to criticise The White Peacock, and the danger in an appreciation is that one should say too much good of it, for the book yields just the quality of illusion that a novel should give us, which does not of itself justify the critic in saying that it is a great book. For the novel, equally with the picture, can never reproduce life; it can only suggest it, and when it does suggest it, however peculiarly or partially, one is inclined to exaggerate the impression one has received and to refrain from considering whether it is a true impression. It is the vividness of Mr Lawrence's nature-vision carries us away; such phrases as these deceive us: 'The earth was red and warm, pricked with the dark, succulent green of bluebell sheaths, and embroidered with gray-green clusters of spears, and many white flowerets. High above, above the light tracery of hazel, the weird oaks tangled in the sunset. Below in the first shadows drooped hosts of little white flowers, so silent and sad, it seemed like a holy communion of pure wild things, numberless, frail and folded meekly in the evening light.' They deceive us because Mr Lawrence's realisation of man is less assured than his realisation of nature. I doubt the quality of his people's culture, the spontaneity of their attitude towards the fields in which they breathe; their spontaneity seems almost artificial.

That impression Mr Lawrence always gives; he sees the world through a magnifying-glass, and perhaps more so in Sons and Lovers than in The White Peacock. In that book he gives us unabashed autobiography—the story of his early youth, of his relation to his mother, a creature of fitful, delicate charm. Mrs Morel is very Northern; she has, with the harshness of her latitude, its fine courage and its ambition; Paul Morel, the hero, is Mr Lawrence himself, the little blue flower on the clinker heap. And those other folk about him, dark Miriam, slowly brooding over him; her rival, that conquering captive of sex; the brothers, the sisters, and the friends; this intense society is vital and yet undefinably exaggerated. Perhaps not so undefinably, for I am oppressed by unbelief when I find this grouping of agriculturists and colliers 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, but it is not general, and that is what impairs the value of Mr Lawrence's visions. Because a thing is, he believes that it is; when a thing is, it may only be accidental; it may be particular. Now one might discuss at length whether a novelist should concentrate on the general or on the particular, whether he should use the microscope or the aplanetic lense, and many champions will be found in the field. I will not attempt to decide whether he should wish, as Mr Wells, to figure all the world, or as Mr Bennett, to take a section; probably the ideal is the mean. But doubtless the novelist should select among the particular that which has an application to the general, and it may safely be said that, if Mr Lawrence errs at all, it is in selecting such particular as has not invariably a universal application.

Mr Lawrence lays himself open to this criticism in a work such as Sons and Lovers, because it has a conscious general scope, but in The Trespasser his conception is of a lesser compass. The book holds a more minute psychological intention. That Sigmund should leave his wife for another love and find himself driven to his death by an intolerable conflict between his desire, the love he bears his children, and the consciousness of his outlawry, should have made a great book. But this one of Mr Lawrence's novels fails because the author needs a wide sphere within which the particular can evolve; he is clamouring within the narrow limits of his incident; Sigmund appears small and weak; unredeemed by even a flash of heroism; his discontented wife, her self-righteous child hold their own views, and not enough those of the world 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 as well 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 from the realists who have won fame by seeing the dunghill very well, and not at all the spreading chestnut-tree above. Though he select from the world, he is greedy for its beauty, so greedy that from all it has to give, 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 Mr Lawrence to Parnassus, but I doubt whether such cries as these, where an urgent wistfulness mingles in tender neighbourhood with joy and pain together coupled, can remain unheard.

And so it seems strange to find in Mr Lawrence activities alien a little to such verses as these, to have to say that he is also an authoritative critic of German literature, and the author of a prose drama of colliery life. More gladly would I think of him always as remote from the stirrings of common men, forging and nursing his dreams. For dreams they are, and they will menace the realities of his future if he cannot 'breathe upon his star and detach its wings.' It is not only the dragon of autobiography that threatens him. It is true that so far he has written mainly of himself, of the world in intimate relation with himself, for that every writer must do a little; but he has followed his life so very closely, so often photographed his own emotions, that unless life holds for him many more adventures, and unless he can retain the power to give minor incident individual quality, he may find himself written out. For Mr Lawrence has not what is called ideas. He is stimulated by the eternal rather than by the fugitive; the fact of the day has little significance for him; thus, if he does not renew himself he may become monotonous, or he may cede to his more dangerous tendency to emphasise overmuch. He may develop his illusion of culture among the vulgar until it is incredible; he may be seduced by the love he bears nature and its throbbings into allowing his art to dominate him. Already his form is often turgid, amenable to no discipline, tends to lead him astray. He sees too much, feels significances greater than the actual; with arms that are too short, because only human, he strives to embrace the soul of man. This is exemplified in his last novel, The Rainbow, of which little need be said, partly because it has been suppressed, and mainly because it is a bad book. It is the story of several generations of people so excessive sexually as to seem repulsive. With dreadful monotony the women exhibit riotous desire, the men slow cruelty, ugly sensuality; they come together in the illusion of love and clasp hatred within their joined arms. As in Sons and Lovers, but with greater exaggeration, Mr Lawrence detects hate in love, which is not his invention, but he magnifies it into untruth. His intensity of feeling has run away with him, caused him to make particular people into monsters that mean as little to us, so sensually crude, so flimsily philosophical are they, as any Medusa, Medea, or Klytemnestra. The Rainbow, as also some of Mr Lawrence's verse, is the fruit of personal angers and hatreds; it was born in one of his bad periods from which he must soon rescue himself. If he cannot, then the early hopes he aroused cannot 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 Amber Reeves would have greeted as defiantly the converse of my proposition. She stood in a large garden on Campden Hill, where an at-home was proceeding, her effect heightened by Mr Ford Madox Hueffer's weary polish, and the burning twilight of Miss May Sinclair. Not far off Mr Wyndham Lewis was languid and Mr Gilbert Cannan eloquently silent. Miss Violet Hunt, rather mischievous, talked to Mr Edgar Jepson, who obviously lay in ambush, preparing to slay an idealist, presumably Sir Rabindrahath Tagore. I felt very mild near this young lady, so dark in the white frock of simplicity or artifice, with broad cheeks that recalled the rattlesnake, soft cheeks tinted rather like a tea rose, with long, dark eyes, wicked, aggressive, and yet laughing. I felt very old—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 still the child who has been 'brought up pious,' attended Sunday School and felt a peculiar property in God. Daughter of a New Zealand Cabinet Minister and of a mother so rich in energy that she turned to suffrage the scholarly Mr Pember Reeves, Miss Amber Reeves was a spoilt child. She was also the child of a principle, had been sent to Kensington High School to learn to be democratic and meet the butcher's daughter. She had been to Newnham too, taken up socialism, climbed a drain pipe and been occasionally sought in marriage. At ten she had written poems and plays, then fortunately gave up literature and, as a sponge flung into the river of life, took in people as they were, arrived at the maxim that things do not matter but only the people who do them. A last attempt to organise her took place in the London School of Economics, where she was to write a thesis; one sometimes suspects that she never got over it.

This is not quite just, for she is changed. Not hostile now, but understanding, interested in peculiarities as a magpie collecting spoons. Without much illusion, though; her novels are the work of a faintly 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 (zoological originality) one thinks also of an Italian greyhound with folded paws, or a furred creature of the bush that lurks and watches with eyes mischievous rather than cruel.

On reading this over again I discover that she has got over the London School of Economics, though her first two books showed heavy the brand of Clare Market. Miss Amber Reeves started out to do good, but has fortunately repented. She has not written many novels, only three in five years, an enviable record, and they were good novels, with faults that are not those of Mrs Barclay or of Mr Hall Caine. Over every chapter the Blue Book hovered. Her first novel, The Reward of Virtue, exhibited the profound hopelessness of youth. For Evelyn Baker, daughter of a mother who was glad she was a girl because 'girls are so much easier,' was doomed to lead the stupid life. Plump, handsome, fond of pink, she lived in Notting Hill, went to dances, loved the artist and married the merchant, knew she did not love the merchant and went on living with him; she took to good works, grew tired of them, and gave birth 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 seems difficult to believe it is the story of anybody. But it is. The Reward of Virtue is a remarkable piece of realism, and it is evidence of taste in a first novel to choose a stupid heroine, and not one who plays Vincent d'Indy and marries somebody called Hugo.

In that book Miss Amber Reeves indicated accomplishment, but this was rather slight; only in her second novel, A Lady and Her Husband, was she to develop her highest quality: the understanding of the ordinary man. (All young women novelists understand the artist, or nobody does; the man they seldom understand is the one who spends fifty years successfully paying bills.) The ordinary man is Mr Heyham, who runs tea shops and easily controls a handsome wife of forty-five, while he fails to control Fabian daughters and a painfully educated son. He runs his tea shops for profit, while Mrs Heyham comes to the unexpected view that he should run them for the good of his girls. There is a revolution in Hampstead when she discovers that Mr Heyham does not, for the girls are sweated; worse still, she sees that to pay them better will not help much, for extra wages will not mean more food but only more hats. They are all vivid, the hard, lucid daughters, the soft and illogical Mrs Heyham, and especially Mr Heyham, kindly, loving, generous, yet capable of every beastliness while maintaining his faith in his own rectitude. Mr Heyham is a triumph, for he is just everybody; he is 'the man with whose experiences women are trained to sympathise while he is not trained to sympathise with theirs.' He is the ordinary, desirous man, the male. Listen to this analysis of man: 'He has a need to impress himself on the world he finds outside him, an impulse that drives him to achieve his ends recklessly, ruthlessly, through any depth of suffering and conflict ... it is just by means of the qualities that are often so irritating, their tiresome restlessness, their curiosity, their disregard for security, for seemliness, even for life itself, that men have mastered the world and filled it with the wealth of civilisation. It is after this foolish, disorganised fashion of theirs, each of them—difficult, touchy creatures—busy with his personal ambitions, that they have armed the race with science, dignified it with art—one can take men lightly but one cannot take lightly the things that men have done.'

That sort of man sweats his waitresses because such is his duty to the shareholders. It is in this sort of man, Mr Heyham, who wants more money, in Edward Day, the prig who hates spending it, that Miss Amber Reeves realises herself. Analysis rather than evocation is her mission; she does not as a rule seek beauty, and when she strives, as in her last novel, Helen in Love, where a cheap little minx is kissed on the beach and is thus inspired, Miss Amber Reeves fails to achieve beauty in people; she achieves principally affectation. Beauty is not her metier; irony and pity are nearer to her, which is not so bad if we reflect that such is the motto of Anatole France. Oh! she is no mocking literary sprite, as the Frenchman, nor has she his graces; she is somewhat tainted by the seriousness of life, but she has this to distinguish her from her fellows: she can achieve laughter without hatred.

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

But even so Miss Amber Reeves distinguishes herself from her immediate rivals, Miss Viola Meynell, Miss Bridget Maclagan, Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith, Miss Katherine Gerould, by an interest in business and in politics. She really knows what is a limited liability company or an issue warrant. She is not restricted to love, but embraces such problems as money, rank, science, class habits, which serve or destroy love. She finds her way in the modern tangle where emotion and cupidity trundle together on a dusty road. She is not always just, but she is usually judicial. Her men are rather gross instead of strong; she likes them, she tolerates them, they are altogether brutes and 'poor dears.' But then 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 be surprised if a reader of, say, Starbrace or Sussex Gorse, were to think that Sheila Kaye-Smith is the pen-name of a man. Just as one suspects those racy tales of guardsmen, signed 'Joseph Brown' or 'George Kerr,' of originating from some scented boudoir, so does one hesitate before the virility, the cognisance of oath and beer, of rotating crop, sweating horse, account book, vote and snickersnee that Sheila Kaye-Smith exhibits in all her novels. This is broader, deeper than the work of the women novelists of to-day, who, with the exception of Amber Reeves, are confined in a circle of eternally compounding pallid or purple loves. One side of her work, notably, surprises, and that is the direction of her thoughts away from women, their great and little griefs, towards men and the glory of their combat against fate. Sheila Kaye-Smith is more than any of her rivals the true novelist: the showman of 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 and retracted a little, as if always in pain because man is not so beautiful as the earth that bore him, because he fails in idealism, falls away from his hopes and cannot march but only shamble from one eternity into another. There is in her a sort of cosmic choler restrained by a Keltic pride that is ready to pretend a world made up of rates and taxes and the 9.2 train to London Bridge. Afire within, she will not allow herself to 'commit melodrama.' In Isle of Thorns her heroine, Sally Odiarne, so describes her attempt to murder her lover, and I like to think of Sheila Kaye-Smith's will leashing the passion that strains. I like even more 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, is all Sussex. For Sheila Kaye-Smith has given expression to the county that from the Weald spreads green-breasted to meet the green sea. In all the 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 of Cockneyism and American. It is the speech of the oasthouse, of the cottage on the marsh, of the forester's hut in Udimore Wood, where sings the lark and rivulets flow like needles through the moss.

Assez de littÉrature! Sheila Kaye-Smith is not a painter, even though with dew diamonds the thorn-bush she spangle. Her Sussex is male: it is not the dessicated Sussex of the modern novelist, but the Sussex of the smuggler, of the Methodist, the squire; the Sussex where men sweat, and read no books. Old Sussex, and the Sussex of to-day which some think was created by the L.B. & S.C. Railway, she loves them both, and in both has found consolation, but I think she loves best the old. It was old Sussex made her first novel, The Tramping Methodist. Old Sussex bred its hero, Humphrey Lyte. He was a picaresque hero, the young rebel, for he grew enmeshed in murder and in love, in the toils of what England called justice in days when the Regent went to Brighton. But Lyte does not reveal Sheila Kaye-Smith as does Starbrace. Here is the apologia for the rebel: Starbrace, the son of a poor and disgraced man, will not eat the bread of slavery at his grandfather's price. You will imagine the old man confronted with this boy, of gentle blood but brought up as a labourer's son, hot, unruly, lusting for the freedom of the wet earth. Starbrace is a fool; disobedient he is to be flogged. He escapes among the smugglers on Winchelsea marsh, to the wild world of the mid-eighteenth century. It is a world of fighting, and of riding, of blood, of excisemen, of the 'rum pads' and their mistresses, their dicing and their death. Despite his beloved, Theodora Straightway, lady who fain would have him gentleman, Starbrace must ride away upon his panting horse, Pharisee. Love as he may, he cannot live like a rabbit in a hutch; he must have danger, be taken, cast into a cell, be released to die by the side of Pharisee, charging the Pretender's bodyguard at Prestonpans. All this is fine, for she has the secret of the historical novel: to show not the things that have changed, but those which have not.

Starbrace is, perhaps, Sheila Kaye-Smith's most brilliant flight, but not her most sustained. She has had other adventures in literature, such as Isle of Thorns, where Sally Odiarne wanders with Stanger's travelling show, hopelessly entangled in her loves, unable to seize happiness, unable to give herself to the tender Raphael, bound to good-tempered, sensual Andy, until at last she must kill Andy to get free, 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 of her may be found in another book, Three Against the World, where the worthless Furlonger family can but writhe as worms drying in the sun; in the tired flatness of her last work, The Challenge to Sirius. The vagary of her mind is in such work as criticism: she has published a study of John Galsworthy which is judicial, though not inspired. But she was destined for finer tasks. Already in Spell Land, the story of a Sussex farm where lived two people, driven out of the village because they loved unwed, she had given a hint of her power to see not only man but 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 La Terre, but if the beauty is anything it is Virgilian, not Homeric. The scheme is immense, the life of Reuben Backfield, of Odiam, inspired in early youth with the determination to possess Boarzell, the common grown with gorse and firs, the fierce land of marl and shards where naught save gorse could live. The opening is a riot, for the Enclosures Act is in force and the squire is seizing the people's land. In that moment is born Reuben's desire; Boarzell shall be his. He buys some acres and his struggle 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, and would foil man. Reuben is not foiled; he can bear all things, so can dare all things. He buys more land; there shall be on his farm no pleasure so that he may have money to crush Boarzell. His brother, Harry, is struck while Reuben blows up the enemy trees, and haunts his life, a horrible, idiot figure; his wife, Naomi, ground down by forced child-bearing (for Boarzell needs men and Reuben sons) dies. His six sons, devoid of the money Boarzell takes, leave him; one becomes a thief, another a sailor, another a sot in London, another a success; all leave him, even his daughters; one to marry a hated rival farmer, one to love because Reuben forbade love, and to end on the streets. He loses all, he loses his pretty second wife, he loses Alice Jury whom alone he loved, 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 clichÉs; Sheila Kaye-Smith loves the stars too well, and often indulges in horrid astronomic orgies; there is not enough actual combat with the earth; the author intervenes, points to the combat instead of leaving at grips the two beasts, Reuben and Boarzell. She has not quite touched the epic, yet makes us want to resemble the hero, fierce, cruel, but great when old and alone, still indomitable. And one wonders what she will do, what she will 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 of Gilgamesh:—

'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 is enough that to-day she is already alone.