In Mr Beresford we discover a closer identity between the man and the mask, though he has written several books where he does not figure, _The Hampdenshire Wonder_, the tale of an incredible child, _The House in Demetrius Road_, and _Goslings_, a fantastic commentary upon life. Mr Beresford is more at his ease when he tells his own tale. In three books, _The Early History of Jacob Stahl_, _A Candidate for Truth_, and _The Invisible Event_, Mr Beresford has exploited himself with some eloquence; he has the sense of selection, he is not crabbed, and he informs with fine passion those early years through which fleets a fine woman figure. In these books, as also in _Housemates_, Mr Beresford shows that he knows love, and isolation, and pain: those other young men with whom we are concerned feel these things, too, but hardly one so passionately. Mr Beresford's merit is that he is more ordinary, thus that he is less unreal than the passionate persons his rivals are or would be. Yet, if this were all, it might not be enough, for a tale may be told twice but not more often; if, in the first part of _Goslings_, Mr Beresford had not shown how closely and incisively he can picture the lower-middle class, analyse its ambitions, sympathise with its hopes, his would be a limited scope. I hope he will go further in this direction, extend his criticism of life through more of those people and more of their fates, while he himself remains outside. He must choose: Jacob Stahl, that is Mr Beresford, is a charming creature whom one would gladly know; but Jasper Thrale, expounding the world, is not Mr Beresford, for he is a prig. Mr Beresford may run on two lines: one for himself alone, and one for the world as he sees it.
Mr D. H. Lawrence's is not in the same class. Once only can he have been autobiographical; either in _The White Peacock_, or in _Sons and Lovers_, for he could evidently not have been, at the same time, the poetic son of a collier and a cultured member of the well-to-do classes in a farming community. Probably it is an open secret that Mr Lawrence is closer to the Nottingham collier than to the rustic who made hay while others played Bach. But it does not matter very much whether he be one or the other; it is not his physical self he puts into his books, but the adventures of his temperament. It is a curious temperament, a mixture of Northern brutality with wistful Northern melancholy. His characters, and this applies to George and Lettice in _The White Peacock_, to Sigmund, in _The Trespasser_, to Paul Morel, Mrs Morel, and Miriam, in _Sons and Lovers_, are always battling with adversity for the sake of their fine hopes, are held up by their pride, and divorced a little from commoner folk by the taste that takes them to Verlaine and Lulli. If it is Mr Lawrence to whom every flower of the hedge and every feather of the strutting cock cries colour and passionate life, if it is for him that the water-meadows are fragrant and the star-lit nights endless deep, it is not for him that the characters live, but for us: he takes his share, he leaves us ours; he inflames his characters, then allows them to act. Indeed, if no fault were to be found with him on mere literary score, Mr Lawrence would be more than a man of promise: he would have arrived. But his passion carries him away; he sees too much, shows too much, he analyses too fully, discovers too many elements. It may be urged that no artist can see or analyse too fully. But he can, if he discovers that which is not there. Mr Lawrence, having found gold in the dross of common men and women, is inclined to infer that there is too much gold in the vulgar. Being convinced of this, he becomes hectic; his people are as flames, feeding upon mortal bodies and burning them up. His peril is excessive sensation. He needs some better knowledge of affairs, more intercourse with the cruder rich, with the drab middle-class, so that his brilliant vision may by its dulling become tolerable to meaner eyes. He needs to discover those for whom music hath no charms, and yet are not base in attitude.