ss than this, I do not know of
it. Only a novelist who has had his troubles can understand fully what a
dance among china cups, what a skating over thin ice, what a tight-rope
performance is achieved in this astounding chapter. A false note, one
fatal line, would have ruined it all. On the one hand lay brutality; a
hundred imitative louts could have written a similar chapter brutally,
with the soul left out, we have loads of such 'strong stuff' and it is
nothing; on the other side was the still more dreadful fall into
sentimentality, the tear of conscious tenderness, the redeeming glimpse of
'better things' in Alf or Emmy that could at one stroke have converted
their reality into a genteel masquerade. The perfection of Alf and Emmy is
that at no point does a 'nature's gentleman' or a 'nature's lady' show
through and demand our refined sympathy. It is only by comparison with
this supreme conversation that the affair of Keith and Jenny seems to fall
short of perfection. But that also is at last perfected, I think, by
Jenny's final, 'Keith ... Oh, Keith!...'

"Above these four figures again looms the majestic invention of 'Pa.'
Every reader can appreciate the truth and humour of Pa, but I doubt if
anyone without technical experience can realise how the atmosphere is made
and completed, and rounded off by Pa's beer, Pa's meals, and Pa's
accident, how he binds the bundle and makes the whole thing one, and what
an enviable triumph his achievement is.

"But the book is before the reader and I will not enlarge upon its merits
further. Mr. Swinnerton has written four or five other novels before this
one, but none of them compares with it in quality. His earlier books were
strongly influenced by the work of George Gissing; they have something of
the same fatigued greyness of texture and little of the same artistic
completeness and intense vision of _Nocturne_.

"This is a book that will not die. It is perfect, authentic and alive.
Whether a large and immediate popularity will fall to it, I cannot say,
but certainly the discriminating will find it and keep it and keep it
alive. If Mr. Swinnerton were never to write another word I think he might
count on this much of his work living, when many of the more portentous
reputations of today may have served their purpose in the world and become
no more than fading names."

=iv=

Arnold Bennett has described Swinnerton personally in a way no one else is
likely to surpass. I will pre