novel was the display of character. Thus were produced many very admirable works; and I should be sorry if I were thought to be arguing in these tentative and far from dogmatic notes that we are now witnessing a triumph of light over darkness. I am attempting to do no more than trace what seems to be the beginning of a new movement, a new change of direction, in our literature. And it is probably fair to say as well that the novel of character tends to take as its sphere only the prose of life. The literary art (necessarily no subject for absolute definitions) can do many things: it can depict life, it can criticise life, and it can, whether on the plane of sublimity or on that of mere fantasy, create a new and substantial life of its own. But the novel in which the portrayal of character has first place over the story tends to do only the first and second of these things. It might indeed be argued that this is the proper province of the novel and that the attempt to do more invades the territory of epic or dramatic verse. But there are examples to the contrary; and at all events it is worth while for the next generation of novelists to try to prove, as I believe it will try, by further examples that the contrary is true.

It is certain that, on the whole and comparatively, the novel of character is deficient in poetic feeling and what, until criticism invents a better term, we must continue to call "atmosphere." This does not mean that the modern novel must swerve from the details of everyday life to the apparatus of romantic decoration. The squalid and sordid scenes of Mr. Conrad's Secret Agent are full of a poetic feeling which is not produced in Mr. Compton Mackenzie's Carnival or Sinister Street by many pages of ornamental diction and romantic

attitude. Nevertheless it is true that in the younger novelists something is at work which can be best, though only approximately, described as a return to the romantic. Mr. Brett Young has closer affinities with Keats or Coleridge, or, if you please, the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho, than with Mr. Galsworthy. Miss Romer Wilson is much nearer in spirit to Hugo or Gautier or even Goethe than to Mr. Walpole. These writers seek to free themselves from the chains of the average-which is not quite the same as the normal—and, in writing of extraordinary and interesting things, to enlarge the scope of their art.

The dangers to which the modern romanticist exposes himself are obvious enough. Mr. Brett Young's Dark Tower is a beautiful picture of wild and lonely country in which a strange love-story is enacted. But it is the background which remains in the reader's mind when he closes the book. The persons are too dim, their passions are too airy: they fade away and are lost in the more vivid landscape. His Tragic Bride, in spite of an opening of remarkable charm, poetry, and narrative skill, fails to make a complete effect because the characters are not convincing and consistent enough to support the burden of an unusual story. In Miss Wilson's latest book the chief character is conceived on lines so lofty and incredible that sometimes the author is plainly appealing to the reader to imagine for himself what her mind has conceived and her pen cannot bring forth.

The dangers of the romanticist are unreality, extravagance, absurdity, just as those of the realist are dullness and triviality. But the romanticist is attempting something different, and if he can to a reasonable extent avoid his special pitfalls he

will produce something worth the risk. In his Black Diamond, without going outside this country or this century for his scene, Mr. Brett Young has written a picaresque novel which is a delightful and refreshing piece of work. It has proportion and symmetry, poetic feeling and loveliness of atmosphere, and, above all, rhythm and coherence of story. And Miss Wilson's Death of Society is a daring fantasy, which expresses beauty by means of symbols, obscure indeed yet powerful in their inarticulateness.

I have chosen these two books as illustrations of my argument because they have appeared recently. There are others. There are, in still another kind, the romances of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Flying Inn, books which may prove at some future time, in spite of the hasty negligence with which they are written (or at least the second of them), to have had more influence than is now apparent. Literature changes. One form, one attitude, is exhausted. Another appears, produces its fresh and vigorous first crops, grows exhausted in its turn, produces perhaps a crop of works which are extravagantly absurd or tediously academic. Nothing in literature is certain, not even pronouncements on books which have been in existence for centuries, still less such diagnostics and predictions as have been rashly ventured here. But this is certain, that no form of literature which ceases to develop will continue to produce good works; and, unless the novel changes, it will no longer be a living form of literature.

The Position in the Theatre

THE phrases" commercial drama" and "artistic drama" beg a good many questions and institute an offensive comparison. But they do at least correspond to a certain reality, and they indicate the existence of that strange cleavage which is the most curious feature of the modern English theatre.

The age in which we live is characteristically commercial. The word is used here in a strict, not a vaguely abusing, sense: it should convey the idea that our civilisation is more concerned with buying and selling than with production and consumption. A few human activities have succeeded in resisting the standard of values thus set up, but almost all, including the arts, have been to some extent influenced by it. If any one requires confirmation of the statement that the arts have been so influenced, let him consider the quite modern doctrine, often fanatically urged, that the artist ought to be completely indifferent to the material reward he receives for his work. Such a doctrine is clearly, in its unreason, a mere reaction against the governing principle that no human activity ought to be thought of save in terms of material reward.

In the theatre, as nowhere else in the arts, action and reaction are embodied, are recognisably separated one from the other. On the one side we have the "West End" theatres with their provincial allies, whither "West End" successes are sent on tour. On the other are such bodies as the Stage Society and the Phoenix Society, and, both in London and in the provinces, the Repertory

Theatres. The gulf is not impassable. Plays are sometimes staged in the West End for other reasons than because a manager thinks them likely to run for three hundred nights: a few can be seen which, for whatever reasons they were staged, and however they have succeeded, seem to have been written at least with an admixture of other motives. And we have all seen Repertory Theatres hastily throwing over the principle of their existence when a run of three hundred nights appeared to offer itself. But the gulf is there, and it is a gulf which is not to be found elsewhere. There are "commercial" novels and "artistic" novels; but they often come from the same publisher and sometimes from the same author. The "artistic" novel, at any rate, is not often published in a limited edition for subscribers only. No: the cleavage in the theatre is a unique thing, and the investigation of its origin and meaning leads one into the history of the English drama during the last thirty years.

For it was about thirty years ago that this phenomenon first arose. If one wanted a precise date, none better could be chosen than that of the formation of the Independent Theatre by Mr. J. T. Grein. Mr. Grein's first production was Ghosts; and in 1892 he produced Mr. Shaw's Widowers' Houses, a piece laid aside by its author seven years before because it was manifestly impossible that the ordinary stage should ever have any use for it. But the significance of the new departure escapes us if we forget what made it necessary. The English theatre, during the nineteenth century, had fallen into an almost unparalleled state of degradation. Before it reached that desert tract which somehow, parched and footsore, it yet succeeded in crossing, it