We have already noted that “Round the Corner,” Mr. Gilbert Cannan’s liveliest appeal to our attention, belongs to the order of _constatations_ pure and simple; to the degree that _as_ a document of that nature and of that rigour the book could perhaps not more completely affirm itself. When we have said that it puts on record the “tone,” the manners, the general domestic proceedings and _train de vie_ of an amiable clergyman’s family established in one of the more sordid quarters of a big black northern city of the Liverpool or Manchester complexion we have advanced as far in the way of descriptive statement as the interesting work seems to warrant. For it _is_ interesting, in spite of its leaving itself on our hands with a consistent indifference to any question of the charmed application springing from it all that places it in the forefront of its type. Again as under the effect of Mr. Bennett’s major productions our sole inference is that things, the things disclosed, _go on and on, in any given case, in spite of everything_—with Mr. Cannan’s one discernible care perhaps being for how extraordinarily much, in the particular example here before him, they were able to go on in spite of. The conception, the presentation of this enormous inauspicious amount as bearing upon the collective career of the Folyats is, we think, as near as the author comes at any point to betraying an awareness of a subject. Yet again, though so little encouraged or “backed,” a subject after a fashion makes itself, even as it has made itself in “The Old Wives’ Tale” and in “Clayhanger,” in “Sons and Lovers,” where, as we have hinted, any assistance rendered us for a view of one _most_ comfortably enjoys its absence, and in Mr. Hugh Walpole’s newest novel, where we wander scarcely less with our hand in no guiding grasp, but where the author’s good disposition, as we feel it, to provide us with what we lack if he only knew how, constitutes in itself such a pleading liberality. We seem to see him in this spirit lay again and again a flowered carpet for our steps. If we do not include Mr. Compton Mackenzie to the same extent in our generalisation it is really because we note a difference in him, a difference in favour of his care for the application. Preoccupations seem at work in “Sinister Street,” and withal in “Carnival,” the brush of which we in other quarters scarce even suspect and at some of which it will presently be of profit to glance. “I answer for it, you know,” we seem at any rate to hear Mr. Gilbert Cannan say with an admirably genuine young pessimism, “I answer for it that they were really _like_ that, odd or unpleasant or uncontributive, and therefore tiresome, as it may strike you;” and the charm of Mr. Cannan, so far as up or down the rank we so disengage a charm, is that we take him at his word. His guarantee, his straight communication, of his general truth is a value, and values are rare—the flood of fiction is apparently capable of running hundreds of miles without a single glint of one—and thus in default of satisfaction we get stopgaps and are thankful often under a genial touch to get even so much. The value indeed is crude, it would be quadrupled were it only wrought and shaped; yet it has still the rude dignity that it counts to us for experience or at least for what we call under our present pitch of sensibility force of impression. The experience, we feel, is ever something to conclude upon, while the impression is content to wait; to wait, say, in the spirit in which we must accept this younger bustle if we accept it at all, the spirit of its serving as a rather presumptuous lesson to us in patience. While we wait, again, we are amused—not in the least, also to repeat, up to the notch of our conception of amusement, which draws upon still other forms and sources; but none the less for the wonder, the intensity, the actuality, the probity of the vision. This is much as in “Clayhanger” and in “Hilda Lessways,” where, independently of the effect, so considerably rendered, of the long lapse of time, always in this type of recital a source of amusement in itself, and certainly of the noblest, we get such an admirably substantial thing as the collective image of the Orgreaves, the local family in whose ample lap the amenities and the humanities so easily sit, for Mr. Bennett’s evocation and his protagonist’s recognition, and the manner of the presentation of whom, with the function and relation of the picture at large, strikes such a note of felicity, achieves such a simulation of sense, as the author should never again be excused for treating, that is for neglecting, as beyond his range.