are tales of little boys and their keepers; literary London: that
is the grasshopper and its summer singing. He needs to develop, to
embrace business and politics, the commonness of love, and the vital
roughness of the world. He has tried to do this in _The Dark Forest_,
but this is so close a _pastiche_ of Russian novels that it cannot stand
for Mr Walpole's emancipation.

IV

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 Lawr