18 
LAND &> WATER 
OctoberfllO, 1918 
Recent Novels 
ir~ ■ ^HE critic who called Mr. Compton Mackenzie's 
I Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett 
I (Seeker, 6s. net) a "movie" novel was aiming 
I pretty close to the mark. The cinema thrives 
-^^ on incident and wastes away on psychology. It 
would be easier to make a film of Sylvia's escapades than of a 
novel by Mr. Henry James This means that Mr. Mackenzie 
has flung away almost altogether his passion for beautiful 
writing and dispensed to a noticeable degree witli,his gift for 
characterisation in order to produce a novel in which some- 
thing happens on every page. 
Sylvia had a talent for adventure, and her escapades 
began pre-natally. Her mother was the illegitimate daughter 
of an English nobleman and a Parisian grisette, and had her 
own fling in youth. Sylvia herself had a taste of life with a 
travelling circus in very^arly childhood, and thereafter fled 
to England, disguised as a boy, with her father, who had 
somewhat prosaically committed pett}' peculations in the 
office in which he was employed. But the summary, which 
already begins to be crowded, cannot be continued. The 
epitaph which she wrote for herself at an early age 
contains the mot juste : "Here lies Sylvia Scarlett, who was 
always running away. If she has to hve all over again and 
be the same girl, she accepts no responsibiUty for anytliing 
that may occur." Her adventures mostly arose from her 
habit of running away: and it mattered little whether she 
.ran from a person or the consequences of her own actions. 
It follows that in the course of her life she passed through a 
great many odd places. The house of the Emperor of 
Byzantium, in West Kensington, was one of them ; the 
house of the cabman, Fred Organ, another. "The toughest 
dancing-saloon in Buenos Aires," whither she was escorted 
'by Carlos Morera, stands high in the hst and there is much 
to be said for the Piutonian Hotel, Siilphurville, Indiana. 
But Mr. Mackenzie ha. got more events and changes of scene 
into fewer pages than any other novelist I can remember ; and 
it would be absurd to attempt to outdo him in condensation. 
The utmost that can be done is to give an impression of an 
invention moving as freely as its author wills — re\-olving, 
indeed, with something of the terrifying pace of a fly-wheel 
that is not hitched on to anything. 
And in this image of the fly-wheel lies, perhaps, the most 
serious criticism that can be directed against Mr. Mackenzie's 
book. H s invention is able to move with this bewildering 
and really rather enchanting ^peed only because his char- 
acte:-s a-e as light as feathers. Sylvia, who was a well- 
sketched and convincing minor figure in Sinister Street, is 
here not much more than a formula. Nothing mo e can be 
po^tulatedof her than that she attract- adventures to her. One 
feels that Mr. Mackenzie was attracted by the rapid sitting she 
gave him, but that he found her not so easy a subject for a n ore 
elaborate picture. He was led to make some radical alterations 
in his first impression of her ; and in hi ; effort to do this, and at 
the same time to retain all that originally made her interesting, 
he has just failed to bring her fully into exis ence. Atth same 
time, this criticism may be unfair, since the portrait i< not 
yet complete. Another volume is to come, Sylvia and 
Michael, in which, presumably, the life of Michael Fane will 
also be continued ; but it will be only by a really remarkable 
feat of virtuosity that Mr. Mackenzie can so add to this 
picture of Sylvia as to make it wholly and credibly alive. 
My own hope — and belief — is that he will substitute another 
and more convincing Sylvia. I say "belief," because in 
many ways this booic seems to me to promise, though it 
does not actually contain, a considerable advance on its 
author's previous work. 
On another level, Mr. E. R. Burroughs, in The Beasts of 
Tarzan (JMethuen, 6s. net), rivals Mr. Mackenzie in the 
oddness, if not in the variety, of .his invention. But it 
seems ta me to have been mere folly in Nikolas Rokoff that 
led him to kidnap the wife of an English peer, who had been 
brought up among apes, and was able to enrol and carry 
about with him a bodyguard consisting of "five snarling 
apes, ... a giant black warrior, . . . [and] a panther 
with gleaming jaws agape and fiery eyes." His ultimate 
fate (the pantlier ate him) was a suitable penalty for a clear 
error of judgment. 
O.xford Poets 
.\t this ino nent O.Kford men (and women) are writing 
vorse in such great profusion that it becomes impossible 
to do more than select here and there for comment 
among the volumes which fall from the Press of the 
ingenious Mr. Blackwell. I have before me now two 
volumes whicli seem more suitable for selection than 
most — Mr. .\Idous Huxley's Defeat of Youth and Miss Edith 
Sitwell's Clowns' Houses (Blackwell, 3s. net each). Mr. 
Huxley is a poet whom it is as difficult to praise outright as 
it is to overlook him altogether. He is much influenced 
by the Frencii poets of the later nineteenth century (he 
includes an exceedingly good translation of L'Apres-midi 
d'un Faune), and he derives from them a distinct pleasure 
in baing more subtle and mysterious than perhaps is neces- 
sary and a certain tendency towards feats of virtuosity with 
emotion and language. The title-poem is a somewhat 
obscure sonnet-sequence in which a young man in love 
recoils from his own desires and from the surrender to them 
which the beloved offers him— a rather too co nplex description 
of the shrinking from fulfilment which is a genuine thing, 
thjugh .Mr. Huxley seeks to pin it down more definitely in 
words than it is capable of. Perhaps his best piece is that 
which he calls, unassunlngly. Poem, and which ends : 
But a time came when, turning full of hate 
And weariness from ray remembered themes, 
I wished my poet's pipe could modulate 
Beauty more palpable than words and dreams. 
.\11 loveliness with vvliich an act informs 
The dim uncertain chaos of desire 
Is mine to-day ; it touches me, it warms 
Body and spirit with its outward fire. 
I am mine no more ; I have becomd a part 
Of that great earth that draws a breath and stirs 
To meet the spring. But I could wish my heart 
Were still a winter of frosty gossamers. 
If -Mr. Huxley could abandon his search for the rarer emotions 
for rareness' sake, and. if he could mmige to be a little less 
ingenious all round. He would be a better poet. Probably 
he will. Meanwhile, his virtuosity makes good reading. Miss 
Sitwell's book is all tricks and tours deforce; but they are 
very amusing tricks. When she calls a poem Siraivberry 
Paths, and writes : 
. . . Dame and poppet, each frilled rose 
That in dark leaves lies close — 
Nursing her buds, will curtsey low 
To see me as I go. 
Upon the gravelled paths ; mv plait 
Escapes this broad-brimmed liat ; 
My lips are like ripe strawberries ; 
One little bird that flies. 
Hid in a brown cloak with a tail 
Like some small nightingale 
Whose hidden name is "Love," would fain 
Peck tfiem again — again. 
it affects me like devdled almonds in comparison witli the 
solider fare of poetry to which one is accustomed. I see 
no reason why I should not read as much of this as Miss 
Sitwell cares to write ; but she is less amusing when she 
composes tragic verses on The Madness of SouL 
Flower Fancies 
M. Guy Pierre Fauconnet came into notice last year with 
some- admirable animal drawings in Form. He has now 
published a book of designs in which flowers are made to 
look their names — Floivcr-name Fancies (Lane, 5s. net). His 
drawings, Beardsleyesque without the horror, are almost 
uniformly exquisite ; and he secures the effect of plants and 
flowers with a really remarkable economy of means. His 
Buttercupi, Tor example', is a pure delight. Merely as a design, 
perhaps, the Love-in-a-Mist is the best thing "in the book! 
It is to be hoped that M. Fayconnet will now produce a 
similar book of animals, for those that appear here reveal 
in him a special talent for their portraiture. His own French 
descriptions arc lighter and more amusing than the English 
verses supplied by Mr. Hampden Gordon. 
Peter Bell. 
