JEREMY. By HUGH WALPOLE. Cassell. 7_s._ net.
THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN. By F. BRETT YOUNG. Collins. 7_s._ net.
POOR RELATIONS. By COMPTON MACKENZIE. Secker. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
THE TENDER CONSCIENCE. By BOHUN LYNCH. Secker. 7_s._ net.
SEPTEMBER. By FRANK SWINNERTON. Methuen. 7_s._ net.
TIME AND ETERNITY. By GILBERT CANNAN. Chapman & Hall. 7_s._ net.
RICHARD KURT. By STEPHEN HUDSON. Secker. 7_s._ net.
The literary arena of England is at this moment strewn with the forms of discouraged novelists who were hailed as coming great men and who have never yet been able to make any adequate reply to the hail. The arrival of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett, as writers concerning whom, in whatever tenor, our questions are answered, is within recent memory. Soon after that event a new generation rose. Henry James stooped from Olympus to examine them; and there was a good deal of excitement abroad as to their future performance. But where are they now? Mr. Walpole's latest book carries the history of a child up to his first departure from school. Mr. Compton Mackenzie shows us a popular dramatist struggling for life in the midst of a farcical crowd of relations. Mr. Swinnerton produces punctually one book a year in time for the autumn publishing season. But meanwhile what is happening to the English novel? Is anything happening to it?
It is certainly true that there is no perceptible curve of development or change. There are fashions. Two of the books before us illustrate one of the most popular of them, a fashion begun and now abandoned by Mr. Mackenzie. Mr. Walpole pushes the novel of adolescence to its extreme, or beyond the extreme, by the tender age at which he takes his hero. Mr. Brett Young goes through with it in conventional fashion, conducting Edwin Ingleby from early years at school to his final medical examination and the beginning of life. Mr. Walpole's _Jeremy_ is a very faithful and exact record, and yet it is not easy to say why he should have written it.
Mary, however, was there, and in the very middle of her game, searching for him, as she was always doing, she found him desolate under the shadow of the oak. She slipped away, and, coming up to him with the shyness and fear that she always had when she approached him, because she loved him so much and he could so easily hurt her, said: