NOVELISTS WHO WILL BE FAMOUS

New Zealand Times, Volume XLII, Issue 9788, 11 October 1917, Page 9

NOVELISTS WHO WILL BE FAMOUS

SOME OF THE MEN WHO ARE “MAKING GOOD.” By A. St. John Adcock in the Lon- . don “Dispatch.” Prophecy is not an art; it is a gift and does not seem to be given away nowadays. Our war prophets thought they had got some, but thalt was another of their mistakes. It is the only mistake I am sure of not making. Having made it once or twice, I have permanently retired from the business. In the literary world, at ail events, it is too risky; you have to rely too much on authors wiio often fail to fulfil the promise of their first books. So when I name certain men and women as novelists- with a future, and perhaps a great one. I am not trying Co complete with Old Moore, but merely expressing a pious opinion. We were never richer in good novelists than we are to-day. There is none who towers above the crowd as Dickens did when at twenty-six ho was writing “Pjckwick” ; but fiction is a subtler, finer art now than it was then, and its average quality is incomparably higher. *’ I have no concern at present with the older men of established! reputations ; one assumes that they will continue to hold their ground, but does no(b expect to see them climb higher—they have done so much that we think we know all they can dio; though it is not safe to be cocksure of that in the case of men of genius, such as Wells, or in the case of some few who obviously have not don© growing, such as Percival Gibbon, Oliver Onions, Neil Lyons. Gibbon rivals Conrad and .Kipling in the art of the short story, and jf he would leave journalism alone and stick to his proper work I would chance it and prophesy about him. Onions was a forerunner of some of the ablest of our younger realists, none of whom have surpassed him; and his latest books are his best. Lyons, quaintest and most individual of our living humorists, has been finding himself and progressing all the time since he published “Hockey” fifteen years ago, till the war clapped him into khaki arid arrested his development. Still, on the whole, I suppose one looks to see the great novelist of the future emerge from the younger schools, particularly from one, which beyond question includes the most potential artists in modern English fiction. These have cut loose from tradition and broken the rules of convention. With one or two exceptions they have not been appreciably influenced by any predecessors earliei than Wells or Bennett or the latterday masters of French and Russian realism. 1 To this group belong Compton Mackenzie, J. D. Beresford, Gilbert Cannan, W. L. George, Frank Swinnerton, Ethel Sidgwick, Viola Meynell, Eleanor Mordaunt, Sheila Kaye-Smitb, and Miss Tennvson Jesse. The list could easily be extended, and might properly take In four who have each published a striking first book in the last twelve months: E. M. Delafield (“Zella Sees Herself”), Clerrence Dane (“Regiment of Women”), George Stevenson (“A Little World Apart”) and the un named ex-Mill Girl, whose ‘'Helen of Four Gates” might almost have been written by a twentieth-century Emily Bronte. They are all writing very much the same type of novel, and all <re essentially and intensely modern. Their interest is in the life of the hour, and they are rightly more concerned wit-11 the psychology of their dramatic personae than with anything in <the way of a plot. S, P. B. Maia, a clever novelist of the same order, claims that thev are authentic, “broadminded” realists. “They are honest,” he says, “so refuse to blind themselves to the truth; they are searching for beauty and meet ugliness, so they must needs write down the impression it makes on.

* —vrwr—r-i them.” Which is excellent, So Tar as it goes. But ugliness, sexual excitements, passionate Unrest and unhappy endings are mot the only truths: the passion for business, religion, politics, innocent romantic adventure, and for all sorts of homely, unsensational enjoyments are equally characteristic of the human animal. Prom a commonsenso point of view Barrie is as realistic a* George Moore; each leaves as much of life out of his pictures as he puts into them. I believe the future of most in that group of younger novelists depends very largely on the extent to which they can got rid of the rather naive obsession that they cannot be truthful without being disturbingly uneMivcntional—on the extent to which, they can extend their experiences, or otherwise realise that there are ever go many different kinds of truth, many of which are none the less true because they would not shock even the most sensitive of maiden aunts.. A little outside this group in some respects, • but as brilliant as any of them and as distinctively modern in outlook, are Hugh Walpole, B. C. Booth, Frederick Niven, Patrick MacGill. Stephen /McKenna —whose third hook “Sonia” is one of the biggest novels the war has inspired; Thomas Burke, whoso wonderful tales and sketches of London life (“Limehiouse Nights” and “Nights in Town”) justify the highest expectations of him; Caradoc Evans, whose repellontly impreesive stories of the Welsh peasantry, “My Pebple” and “Ca/pel Sion,” are unique in the fiction or the day; and Harold Brighouso, as stark a realist as any, but one who is not afraid to mix sentiment, idealism, and other gracious actualities with his darker realistic colours. Neither as playwright nor aa novelist (his second novel “Fossie for Short,” is only just coming out, and bis third “A Peace in War,” is still in manuscript) does he tend, like most realists, to be as narrow-minded on one side as the mid-Viotorian prudes wore on another.

I am not suggesting that all on my; list will count as great novelists in. the immediate future, but I do say that if the great noveli»t--of to-morrow does' not arise from.-among them—then he has not yet shown'hie-head above the horizon. And that, too, is possible. "