, the other creative. Of the first class are the tales of
_Widdershins_, and _The Two Kisses_, a skit on studios and
boarding-houses. Even slightly more massive works, such as the love epic
of advertisement, _Good Boy Seldom_, and the fierce revelation of
disappointment which is in _Little Devil Doubt_ do not quite come into
the second class; they are not the stones on which Mr Onions is to
build. They are a destructive criticism of modern life, and criticism,
unless it is creative, is a thing of the day, however brilliant it may
seem. Mr Oliver Onions can be judged only on his trilogy, _In Accordance
with the Evidence_, _The Debit Account_, and _The Story of Louie_, for
these are creative works, threaded and connected; they are an attempt
and, on the whole, a very successful one, to take a section of life and
to view it from different angles. If the attempt has not completely
succeeded, it is perhaps because it was too much. It rests upon close
characterisation, a sense of the iron logic of facts and upon
atmospheric quality. There is not a young man, and for the matter of
that an old one, more than Mr Onions, capable of anatomical psychology.
There may be autobiography in some of Mr Onions's work, but there is in
his trilogy no more than should colour any man's book.

Yet Mr Onions has his devil, and it takes the form of a rage against the
world, of a hatred that seems to shed a bilious light over his puppets.
His strong men are hard, almost brutal, inconsiderate, dominant only by
dint of intellect, and arrogant in their dominance; his weak men are
craven, lying, incapable of sweetness; even strong Louie is so haughty
as almost to be rude. All this appears in the very style, so much so
that, were it not for the cliche, I would quote Buffon. The sentences
are tortured as if born in agony; the highly selected detail is
reluctant, avaricious, as if Mr Onions hated giving the world anything.
And yet, all this culminates in an impression of power: Mr Onions is the
reticent man whose confidence, when earned, is priceless. He lays no
pearls before us; he holds them in his half-extended hand for us to take
if we can. Some tenderness; some belief that men can be gentle and women
sweet; a little more hope and some pity, and Mr Onions will be judged
more fairly.

Of Mr Swinnerton, who also stands outside his canvas, one is not so
sure. He made, in _The Casement_, an elusive picture of the life of the
well-to-do when confronted