'It lay in a great hush, a great solitude, a quiet beast of power and mystery. It seemed to call to him through the twilight like a love forsaken. There it lay: Boarzell--strong, beautiful, desired, untamed, still his hope, still his battle.'
There are faults, here and there, degraded clichés; Sheila Kaye-Smith loves the stars too well, and often indulges in horrid astronomic orgies; there is not enough actual combat with the earth; the author intervenes, points to the combat instead of leaving at grips the two beasts, Reuben and Boarzell. She has not quite touched the epic, yet makes us want to resemble the hero, fierce, cruel, but great when old and alone, still indomitable. And one wonders what she will do, what she will be. There are lines in her poems, _Willow's Forge_, that prophesy; the moment may be enough:--
'When the last constellations faint and fall, When the last planets burst in fiery foam, When all the winds have sunk asleep, when all The worn way-weary comets have come home-- When past and present and the future flee, My moment lives!'
She may strive no more, as she proposes to the seeker in _The Counsel of Gilgamesh_:--
'Why wander round Gilgamesh? Why vainly wander round? What canst thou find, O seeker, Which hath not long been found?
What canst thou know, O scholar, Which hath not long been known? What canst thou have, O spoiler, Which dead men did not own?'
But I do not think so. I do not know whether she will be great. It is enough that to-day she is already alone.
Every now and then a reviewer, recovering the enthusiasm of a critic, discovers that the English novel has lost its form, that the men who to-day, a little ineffectually, bid for immortality, are burning the gods they once worshipped. They declare that the novel, because it is no longer a story travelling harmoniously from a beginning towards a middle and an end, is not a novel at all, that it is no more than a platform where self-expression has given place to self-proclamation. And sometimes, a little more hopefully, they venture to prophesy that soon the proud Sicambrian will worship the gods that he burnt.
I suspect that this classic revival is not very likely to come about. True, some writers, to-day in their cradles, may yet emulate Flaubert, but they will not be Flaubert. They may take something of his essence and blend it with their own; but that will create a new essence, for literature does not travel in a circle. Rather it travels along a cycloid, bending back upon itself, following the movement of man. Everything in the world we inhabit conspires to alter in the mirror of literature the picture it reflects; haste, luxury, hysterical sensuousness, race-optimism and race-despair. And notably publicity, the attitude of the Press. For the time has gone when novels were written for young ladies, and told the placid love of Edwin and Angeline; nowadays the novel, growing ambitious, lays hands upon science, commerce, philosophy: we write less of moated granges, more of tea-shops and advertising agencies, for the Press is teaching the people to look to the novel for a cosmic picture of the day, for a cosmic commentary.