[In the following essay, West offers a favorable review of Sylvia and Michael.]

This sequel to Sylvia Scarlett [Sylvia and Michael]—or rather this concluding half of Sylvia Scarlett which the publisher's regard for the limited weight-lifting powers of the average library subscriber has led him to issue separately—is by far the best thing Mr. Compton Mackenzie has done since Carnival. It gives scope to his gift for the vivacious rendering of quaint idioms and the recording of picturesque incongruities; and that is a very real gift and one which is to be welcomed in this generation of earnest workers in monotone. For there is at present loose among people who write not out of any urgent personal impulse but according to literary fashion a belief, a quite fallacious belief, that if one keeps to neutral tints one is safe. It is a belief of some decades' standing. The world's fiction grew gray at Gissing's breath. He slightly falsified life in the direction of misery, for, bad as the English climate and the London suburbs are, they are not so bad as he describes them; and he continued this falsification for so long and so convincingly that a physical atmosphere more humid than any yet recorded by the Meteorological Society and a spiritual atmosphere of gloom never yet attained by any human society except a Highland village on Sunday became established conventions of the ambitious sort of fiction. A little later it became the right thing to admire Mr. Henry James. He became great enough to be reviewed on day of publication. This meant that busy journalists were obliged to write in a few hours long notices of books which take more than a few days to read. As they never had time to find out what happened in Mr. James's books they were obliged to omit from their notices all mention of this not unimportant aspect of his work. A choking ecstasy about his style saved trouble and was in the movement. Consequently, the public, with its pathetic faith in the press, came to the conclusion that as journalists never said anything about what happened in Mr. James's books nothing did happen. This was a pity, for no writer ever invented more beautifully intricate plots or could deal more gleefully with such goobets of the sensational as a murder or a divorce case. Still the impression persisted, and out of this misapprehension and Gissing's defect there arose a theory that if one was to be a serious writer, the kind that the best people read, one must remove from one's representation of life as much as possible of life's crude content of color and massive events: that art adores a vacuum.

Now this is hard on anybody who is not a first-rate genius. One cannot write well about anything unless one is interested and excited about it, and few of us retain past our childhood enough vitality to be interested and excited about things we see every day. Mr. Arnold Bennett can do that kind of thing. He can write descriptions of a bookshop in St. James's, of a steamer leaving a Thameside pier, of a lift in a hotel, vivid and shapely descriptions that lie in the surrounding story like jewels in a matrix, which are like love-lyrics addressed to the material world. He has looked at these ordinary things with a passionate interest that most people feel only before some prodigy of circumstance. But that is because he has the intense vitality of genius. Mr. Compton Mackenzie has not that power and he knows it; and very sensibly steps outside this convention that one must water down the extravagance of events, and gives us the material from which he can distil interest and excitement in this book about the adventures of a cabaret singer as she wanders through Europe. Wanders however is hardly the right word, for the weakest thing about the book is the effect of jerky haste about Sylvia's peregrinations. It is surely the essence of a picaresque novel that the rogue should travel with an air of leisure. But Sylvia seems to regard herself as a challenge to geography, to be bitten by a desire to be in two places at once. One feels that when she is married to Michael she will insist on setting up house on the moving staircase at Oxford Circus. But that effect is a matter of pace, and there is no more subtle matter of technique than that in any art; to go to music for an analogy, it is hard to put one's finger on what makes a Mozart scherzo a thing that dances home in no time and what makes another composer's scherzo merely a tune that is falling downstairs. In spite of this breathlessness there is much entertainment in the tale of Sylvia's adventures in the cabarets of Bucharest and Petrograd, in bombarded Odessa, in the train of the Bulgarian comitadji leader, in the caique that brought her and Michael to Samothrace.

But the goodness of the book, and the impossibility of realizing that goodness at the first reading, shows that though Mr. Mackenzie has very sensibly kicked over the convention that in the best people's novels nothing happens and you mention it in an undertone, he is still strangling his talent by submitting to another literary fashion of the day. One lays down this book detesting Sylvia as a painted prig, a gyrating piece of rouged tin. One refuses to pity her for the misfortune either of her sex or her upbringing; if she had been born a son of wealthy parents she would only have grown up into an Oxford undergraduate and published the usual book of poems at Blackwell's. Yet after one has closed the book one begins to think, “But this is really a very touching story. It is a moving invention, this strong character who has been prevented by the vagabondish circumstances of her early life from taking up any creative way of life, and so is driven to use her strength in cherishing weak creatures; and just because she is so strong chooses creatures so weak that in the end they betray her and fall back in the dishonor from which it was her passionate aim to lift them. There is an exquisite consistency in the fate that follows each of her squanderings of sacrifice; in the comfortable persuasion of each of those whom she protects that since Sylvia is so strong she will not feel any pain if they desert her; in the way that she hardens herself against humanity because of her experience of its baseness and yet craves more and more for human love. This is a beautifully imagined character. Why is it that the book which describes it is more than faintly irritating?”

One gets a glimpse at the answer in the chapter which tells how Sylvia, who has fled from Bucharest with the little dancer she is mothering to save her from a juggler bully, is stranded penniless in a Rumanian town among the oil-fields; and to buy food for the girl and to save her from descent into degradation decides to raise money by degrading herself. It never actually comes to that; but the decision is made, and the desperate distracted movements of Sylvia's love are the more pitiful because of the flimsy quality of the little dancer, who, indeed, trots off with the juggler the first moment Sylvia turns her back, like a petdog called by a dog-stealer. There is nothing wanting to the pathos of the incident. Yet it does not move us. And the reason is that Sylvia has put us out of temper with herself and her story by waking up in the morning and, while she leans over the sleeping dancer, expounding the motives of her self-sacrifice (which indeed were implicit in the situation) in a soliloquy about the length and the style of a leading article in an evening newspaper. Again, when Sylvia, pathetically enough, feels herself so desolate that she turns for comfort to a religion with which she has no temperamental affinity and tries to join the Roman Catholic Church, one takes a dislike to the incident as soon as she makes a first confession which in prolixity and manner recalls Mr. Garvin's editorials in the Observer.

Here we have the clue to Mr. Mackenzie's singular failure to get the benefit of his own gifts. He is an excellent novelist of incident, particularly of grotesque incident; but he cannot manage any psychological detail. When he tries to draw a person leading a richly reflective life he draws a person who seems to be carrying home his personality in an insufficiently wrapped and tied parcel and who constantly has to sit down by the roadside and fuss with it; and the mental life is so far from being real to him that he loses all individuality of style when he writes of it and pours out journalistic clichés. But why should he concern himself with psychology at all? It is the emptiest convention, started by those who are too cultured to have read anything older than the day before yesterday, that the theme of a novel should work itself out through the psychological reactions of its characters. It would have been deplorable if Dickens had held up David Copperfield while he worked out the mental processes that led Miss Betsy Trotwood to pretend that she had lost all her money; he chose, with his expertness in character, the tortuous course of action she would probably have pursued, but he could never have told the reader exactly how she came to that conclusion. If Mr. Compton Mackenzie would submit to limitations that were good enough for Dickens he would give his talent for incident its opportunity. Meanwhile it is quite worth the reader's while to extricate, by means of deleting all the superfluous passages, the novel of action which lies submerged in the flood of Sylvia and Michael.