As we read this magical evocation of the spirit of place we rub our eyes and ask ourselves have we not been there. This prose of vivid impressionism is the goal of one and all. As the plein air school painted in the open air before Nature, so these men must write as closely round their subject as actual experience can allow them. The vivid realisation of a mood, as we shall see in Hubert Crackanthorpe, is the desired prize. Turn through the pages of Ernest Dowson’s _Dilemmas_, and read, above all, _A Case of Conscience_; leaf Frederick Wedmore’s[12] _Renunciations_, and pause over _The Chemist in the Suburbs_, wherein, as H. D. Traill said, the story of Richard Pelse’s life is a pure joy; in both cases vivid impressionism and mood realisation are the keynotes of the work. To understand these tendencies better and the excellence of the work achieved, it will be more advantageous, perhaps, to consider in more detail one writer only who carried the charm of the prose pen to a higher degree of emphasis and finish in the short story than any of the others, to wit, Hubert Crackanthorpe.
[12] About the worst of Frederick Wedmore’s short stories, such as _The North Coast and Eleanor_, there is a hint of the melodrama of Hugh Conway’s _Called Back_, but it is a feeble replica of the original. The most successful of his short imaginative pieces, as the author rightly terms them, on the other hand, have a refined grace of slow movement that is at once captivating and refreshing. It seems impossible that the same man could have essayed both the worst and the best. As a specimen of the latter type of work, let me fasten on to the description of the entourage of Pelse the chemist, the man with the tastes above his position:
‘There came a little snow. But in the parlour over the shop--with the three windows closely curtained--one could have forgetfulness of weather. There was the neat fireplace; the little low tea-table; a bookcase in which Pelse--before that critical event at Aix-les-Bains--had been putting, gradually, first editions of the English poets; a cabinet of china, in which--but always before Aix-les-Bains--he had taken to accumulate some pretty English things of whitest paste or finest painting; a Worcester cup, with its exotic birds, its lasting gold, its scale-blue ground, like lapis lazuli or sapphire; a Chelsea figure; something from Swansea; white plates of Nantgarw, bestrewn with Billingsley’s greyish pink roses, of which he knew the beauty, the free artistic touch. How the things had lost interest for him! “From the moment,” says some French critic, “that a woman occupies me, my collection does not exist.” And many a woman may lay claim to occupy a French art critic; only one had occupied Richard Pelse.’