Humour and Heaviness

Poor Relations — By Compton Mackenzie
Time and Eternity — By Gilbert Cannan

Why is it those favoured few whose privilege it is to be invited, like fairies, to pronounce a blessing or a curse upon the new novel are invariably condescending and even a trifle contemptuous if the babe be a smiling babe? There are times, indeed, when from their manner one would imagine they half-suspected the innocent radiant creature of being the result of a youthful folly,—a love child. And though, of course, as broad-minded men of the world, they can excuse—nevertheless: ‘Now that you have had your little flutter we hope that you will settle down and produce something serious.’

To be taken seriously in England a novelist must be serious. Poets may be as gay as they please, story-tellers (especially as nobody will publish short stories) as light-hearted as they wish, but if a young man desires to be told (and who does not?) that he is in the front rank, the head of, leading, far outstepping, immeasurably in advance of, all other novelists of the day, he must be prepared to father fiends hid in clouds.

Perhaps another reason for the cool reception of the novel that is not serious is that English people, as a whole, would a great deal rather feel interested, critical, moved and excited than amused. A really serious novel by a brilliant young man flatters them almost as greatly as if that brilliant young man were to appear before them and to beg them to listen to the story of his life. They feel he presupposes them to possess powers of sympathy and of page 89 discernment so extraordinary that it would be ridiculous and below their mutual dignity to waste his time and theirs upon anything that did not call those powers into action. This is very gratifying, but it does not contribute to the gaiety of letters. May we never be amused in our own day? Must we always turn to those words which have been blessed by time or are come from France? We confess to moments when we long to find ourselves at a feast or at a fairing instead of accompanying our young Hamlet to the graveyard and watching and listening while he picks up his first skull and wonders at it….

A glance at the press opinions published at the back of Mr. Mackenzie's latest novel suffices to show the position he occupies among these, our young masters. Each new book of his has provoked his literary godfathers to a fresh shower of blessings, a heavier rain of gifts. From the very first, they recognized him as one of the young men who were going to count, and nobly has he repaid that recognition, passing from strength to strength, from intensity to intensity until with his adventures of Sylvia Scarlett he reached the pitch of high seriousness they had prophesied he should.

But instead of remaining there, instead of preparing for an even sterner climb, he has descended from his cloudy, thunderous eminence into a valley where we hope he may be tempted to linger. Here, to our thinking, is his proper climate, and here he has every appearance of being most admirably at home; and his enjoyment of the scene is so evident that we are inclined to hope he does not look upon it as a mere picnic ground, a place of refreshment from which he will turn now that the holiday is over.

‘Poor Relations’ is an account of the dreadful sufferings that were put upon Mr. John Touchwood, the highly successful playwright, by his highly unsuccessful family. He was a bachelor and he was family-ridden. By nature he was highly romantic, sentimental, over-generous and over-sensitive, and liable on the slightest provocation to ‘rosify’ events and persons. This rosification, until he page 90 met Miss Hamilton, had prevented him from ever looking upon his relatives with a critical eye. It wasn't enough that Mama was Mama, Edith was Edith, and even Hugh was Hugh. But that calm, self-possessed young woman sitting opposite to them in the saloon of the Murmania, by a chance remark to her travelling companion made him see them, just for one moment, as they really were. He had barely finished reading ‘five delightful letters, really, every one of them full of good wishes and cordial affection’; but after her ‘I've never been a poor relation yet, and I don't intend to start now,’ he read them through again, and this time they were the letters, the unmistakable letters, of poor relations.

John had a house in Hampstead where he was completely looked after and bullied in a mild but insistent way by his housekeeper, Mrs. Worfolk. He had another, a country house ‘kept’ for him by Mama and his widowed sister, Hilda, and Hilda's dear little boy, Harold. What he wished to do, upon his return from America, was to divide his time between his two houses and write an extraordinarily fine play on the subject of Joan of Arc. But he had no time to divide. He only had a family—determined in their several ways to get out of him all there was to be got, and had it not been for Miss Hamilton's remark, we see no reason why he should not have been the innocent and half-willing victim. She saved him. She becomes his confidential secretary and, at the happy ending, his wife. But what he endured before that was reached makes the most excellent and amusing reading. The Touchwood family is one of those detestable, fascinating families that we cannot have enough of.

From the moment they are seated round the dining-room table—

at the head of which John took his rightful place; opposite to him, placid as an untouched pudding, sat Grandmamma. Laurence said grace without being invited, after standing up for a moment with an page 91 expression of pained interrogation. Edith accompanied his words by making with her forefinger and thumb a minute cruciform incision between two of the bones of her stays…. Harold flashed his spectacles upon every dish in turn….

we are held—and especially by Harold. He is, perhaps, the most unpleasant little boy imaginable; but, at this safe distance, he is a joy. We cannot bear to part with him. When he is not there, like children at a pantomime, we long to know when he is coming on again, with his questions and his information and his spectacles, and his lantern that he loses control of, and flashes in the face of everybody.

Very different is Mr. Cannan's little book with the big name. Could it be called ‘serious’ even by his most patient admirers? Yet we dare to say it would be hard to find a book more wanting in a sense of humour. The hero is ‘as usual.’ He is Mr. Cannan's same young man, who is on the point of saving England, of bringing back the times of Shakespeare and Fielding, of killing off the old and giving the young the government of everything and the run of the Italian restaurants in Soho. Like his twin brother in ‘Pink Roses,’ this new hero avoids the war, but his reasons are more fully given. He is saving himself; he is waiting for his soul to burn its way out ‘in a clear flame that will not be denied,’ when he will, as his friend tells him, ‘turn the stream of life back into its course.’ This young man's particular time of waiting is passed between what we might call a looking-glass parade, a love affair, and conversations with a Russian.

It is a habit with dentists who wish to put young patients at their ease to say to them, as they ‘open wide,’ ‘I can see what you have had for your breakfast.’ There is nothing in ‘Time and Eternity’ to prevent Mr. Cannan's public from making the same remark once again.

page 92