of our own time. As he sees it, we are living in an age of adventure, and embarking on all manner of hopeful voyages. The verse, the prose, the criticism, the speculation, the fiction of our youth are all to him good in themselves and full of an infinite promise. He is no decrier of the past, indeed he loves to wander in its by-paths, but he will have none of what he calls its "dead hand." Each generation, he holds, has to make its own canons and forms of art, and to accept those of our fathers and grandfathers is merely to hobble our feet in the race. "We may take some bad tosses," he once said, "but at any rate we are moving, and it is better to bark our shins than to be dead."

I have a great admiration and liking for Theophilus, and the other day, when I lunched with him in Soho, I put to him some of my difficulties. We talked first, I remember, of poetry. I said that I found it hard to get my ear accustomed to certain modern licences in rhythm—that, in fact, I found them cacophonous. I added that I could not find the clarity and simplicity I liked, that poetry had become a palimpsest of chaotic reflections and impressions, and that I missed form and architecture. He smiled indulgently.

"That's merely because your ear has grown dull. Anybody who had got accustomed to the Popian couplet would have felt the same thing about Blake or Shelley. We are making new tunes, and in fifty years the world will have grown accustomed to these too, and will have to make others."

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But I don't call them tunes," I objected.

"No more would the Popian have called Shelley's tunes. He would have called them the discords of

Chaos. Our vers libre is only a further step in the same direction."

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I was silenced, so I changed my ground. 'You choke up your verse with details. You don't select enough. You jumble the essential and the trivial in one rag-bag."

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Then

He was inclined to admit some truth in this, but he had his defence. "It's our richness," he said, like the Elizabethans. We love nature and we want to give the effect of God's plenty.' The old way of writing about her was to have some dozen conventional phrases- bosky glades,' ' verdant groves,'' silver floods '-that sort of thing. Tennyson came along, and made the phrases very recondite and beautiful, and put some real observation into them, but they were still conventional. He didn't see nature as she is, but as a set of blank verse lines. Our fellows get right down to her and look at her for themselves. It is no case now of doling out a few dozen literary epithets, but of a patient and intimate observation of all her moods.”

"That's very fine," I said, "but it doesn't always come off. I'm not a poet, only a humble fieldnaturalist. But I read a poem the other day about a moor in autumn, full of your patient and intimate observation, and in six lines I found three bad mistakes about the habits of birds. One might have thought the writer had never been outside Bloomsbury."

"Oh, they make mistakes, no doubt," he replied airily, "but the spirit is right, and it's a new thing in our literature, except for " and he quoted two

poets long since dead of whom I had never heard.

After that we began to talk about fiction. He cross-examined me about my tastes with a twinkle in his eye, for he firmly believes that I have no interest. in stories which are not concerned with pirates. Rather to his surprise he found that I had read quite a number of novels of which he specially approved, and was ready to admit their merits. With much skill he drew from me my halting criticisms. Then he thoughtfully filled his pipe, and fixed me, like the Ancient Mariner, with his glittering eye.

"The novel," he began impressively, "is the modern epic, the modern ballad, the popular form in which the life of our age naturally expresses itself. That form has been widening its bounds ever since Defoe. It enlarged itself from the novel of polite manners to embrace the life of the past, with Scott; with Dickens it took hold of all strata of society; Meredith gave it psychological subtlety; Victor Hugo brought epic poetry into it; Tolstoi gave it a social philosophy; the later Russians carried it into the dark confused places of the human soul. It is steadily advancing in subtlety and scope, and why on earth should we set limits to it? It claims complete freedom, because it deals with all there is of life and death.

"Now for your objections. You say that Mr. Soand-So and Miss This-and-That write badly. Well, you can't expect the glib, pat Stevensonian style. They are not carving nut-shells or painting fans, but trying to reproduce the rough-and-tumble of life. I am sick of this cant of style. Anyhow, they write as well as your precious Scott or Dickens." (“No,

VOL. V, N.S.

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they don't," I interjected, but he took no notice of my interruption.)

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Then you say that the form is crude. You only. mean that there is not the neat beginning, middle and end to which the older novelists accustomed you. Why should we not make new forms for ourselves? We are dealing with a far greater complex of life, and must burst the trammels of earlier conventions. We saturate ourselves with life, and instead of fitting it into the Procrustean bed of a literary form, we let life produce its own form, its own unity. Your criticism might have been urged by Lady Fanny Flummery against Thackeray, and by Mrs. Henry Wood against Tolstoi, and by Miss Braddon against Thomas Hardy. It is the perpetual conflict of the conventionalist against the new creation.

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Again you say that a novel must have a story, and depends for its value upon its moments of high drama. I agree. But the story may be of the processes of the mind, the action and the drama may lie wholly in the spiritual spheres. You say that the diary of the thoughts and emotions of a chemist's assistant in Balham is not a subject for fiction. I utterly disagree. It may afford the profoundest drama. You are obsessed, my dear fellow, with the old sword-and-cloak romance. To you action is something violent and melodramatic, a fight or an escape; but you may get drama which is spiritually more significant out of crossing a room or writing a letter. You forget that to-day we know far more about the human personality. We don't think of it as a smooth, well-defined thing, but as a perpetual

conflict of conscious and subconscious, so that there may be elements of ape and tiger in your amiable young woman which would scare a Wild West desperado. Your hero or heroine need never leave the streets of a suburb to have adventures stranger than those of any figure in Dumas. There may be conflicts in the soul of an elementary schoolmaster with more dramatic value for art than the taking of Jerusalem. What you and fellows like you hanker after is not the artistic but the theatricalyou want a dapper coup de théâtre, an effective curtain. Well, all I have got to say is that that is not life, nor any sort of reality.

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You complain, too, of the excessive predominance of sex in our novels. Why not? It is the most important thing in life, and we can't get near the truth without it. Freud has taught us that our whole unconscious self has a sexual basis. We have none of the old glutinous sentimentality about the relations of men and women. We look at them with a healthily scientific eye, but the immense significance of sex cannot be shirked. We are following the normal path; it is you, who would shut your eyes to it, that are the abnormal."

I confess I was much impressed by these last remarks, for I know Theophilus to be the least morbid or susceptible of my friends, and, as I have said, to be more interested in Rugby football than in female society. His creed was clearly the outcome of reflection and not of natural bias.

As we walked together towards Fleet Street, he gave me in a few general sentences his philosophy of letters.