Miss Butts is a short-story writer of ability; in Ashe of Rings, she essays the novel with much the same technique as she used for the short story. This raises the question of technique. A short digression is, therefore, necessary.

By technique is generally meant the various means which a writer uses to express his vision. As such it is in every period a collective as well as an individual thing; the expression on the one hand, of what people call the spirit of the age, and, on the other, of the personality of the writer. And as in the political realm, as indeed in human life generally, there is here, too, a conflict between the individual and the mass, between the Zeit Geist which, if it could, would make us impersonal and undistinguishable vehicles of its expression, and ourselves as individuals desiring absolute utterance for our personal visions. No absolute freedom of this kind exists, in literature or in life, as we know; and so the writer who tries to escape the spirit of the age (an attempt which must always be hopeless in any case) is likely to attain less freedom than the one who, recognising it, wrestles with it for the prize of his personality. For the spirit of the age is not only a thing which limits the writer's expression (though that it does so we can recognise when we look back even upon such a recent era as the 'nineties); it is also the thing which gives most immediately what life may reside in what he says. But that life, it almost appears, can only be tapped at its living source, as Mr. Joyce tapped it in Ulysses, when one has struggled against the spirit of the age; for in the struggle, the deceptions, superficialities and fashions of the age are stripped away until, if the writer is fortunate or honest, the point is reached where the age and he come into immediate contact, not by a conscious act merely, but through a kind of final necessity. The writer who does not resist his age, defending himself against all its claims crowding in upon him and overwhelming him, will belong to the literature of fashion. The writer who refuses to realise his age is not likely to belong to literature at all. The apparent exceptions to this rule, such as Blake, are not exceptions at all; for no one was more painfully concerned with his age than Blake. This brief generalisation, which could only be supported in a much longer argument, I must leave for the moment as it is.

Ashe of Rings is a striking example of the literature of fashion. Its technique is not essentially personal, as is the technique of writers so various as Mr. Joyce, Mr. Strachey, and Mr. Eliot; it is a technique which might at different moments belong to almost anyone who writes in the idiom of the time. It is a generalised technique and, therefore, never quite fits the situation or the emotion it is enlisted to convey; and so the general effect is always a little false. For it is only a technique which a writer has gradually perfected, not as an exercise, but always for specific and concrete ends, which will render at last his specific vision. Miss Butts' vision, one feels, is sometimes individual; but it is as if she translated it continuously into something which has scarcely anything to do with her or with it. The fault is a common one, though seldom illustrated with such brilliance as inAshe of Rings; its prevalence is what makes it interesting. It is the fault of a large class of writing in which the inspiration is seen by the writer as one thing and the literary effect as something totally different; the first being susceptible of transposition in quite an arbitrary way into the second. When this transposition takes place, the inspiration, which is personal, becomes mere raw material to be manufactured into effects resembling other effects of the time: the unconscious error here, a very elementary one, being that if this process does not happen, the result will belong neither to the age nor to literature. This perennial error is betrayed in bad writing of all kinds; in melodrama, the West-end comedies of our time, the novelette, journalism; but it infects sometimes work which in happier circumstances might have been good. When this occurs it can only be a sign that in a particular writer the spirit of the age is manifesting itself with hesitation, for no writer would take the trouble to secure the outward signs of the age in his work if the influence of the age were felt overpoweringly by him. Miss Butts has made the mistake of trying to express the age instead of herself, which means that the Zeit Geist is not immanent in her, and has to be treated as subject-matter rather than expressed as content.

All this being so, it is not surprising that the story itself should turn out to be as old-fashioned as the style is modern. Miss Butts' characters are not merely good and evil; they are conventionally good and melodramatically evil. She is consistently on the side of virtue, a policy good in itself, but artistically a bad policy, for it inevitably makes the good characters appear prigs; and she does not even try to comprehend evil, again a bad policy, for the more comprehensible evil is made the more interesting aesthetically it becomes, as we may learn from Shakespeare, as well as from Dostoevsky. All this is elementary, yet Miss Butts' imagination ignores it, even if her style does not. That she has talent both her technique and her imagination, sentimental as it often is, tell us. If that talent were integrated, it might produce something above the ordinary. But at present it is not integrated, and from that fact flow all the main faults of the book.