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Mr. Compton Mackenzie has placed himself in an extraordinary position for a man of honour. He is apparently being sued for breach of promise by at least half the eligible young women of his native scene with no co-respondent named. The awkwardness of the situation is not all on Mr. Mackenzie's side, for there must be the pervasive feeling of having been a little too easily seduced.

In short, Mr. Mackenzie startled and delighted the critical world In nineteen twelve or so by writing a very remarkable book called Carnival. He had already published one work, a novel predestined to be minor, and he followed his first triumph with a very long account, in two volumes, of the childhood and adolescence of a boy who was destined to be a priest. Toward the end of these lively pages something alien crept in, and, although it was forgiven, it caused a moment's apprehension. This was in turn banished by the appearance of Guy and Pauline, an interlude of surpassing loveliness. After it, a deluge of novels—three in number, but multitudinous in their faults and terrible in the announcement they bore that Mr. Mackenzie had at last found his way in the world. It was not the way of Carnival and of Guy and Pauline; it was the sorry way of the second half of Sinister Street. What was felt as an aberration has become an attitude, fixed, merciless, and distressing. I do not wonder that some of his disappointed lovers have forced themselves to believe that he was always false.

Alas that he should be false at all who was so fair! It is a fit theme for lamentation, but let those who lament be certain that they know how Mr. Mackenzie has betrayed them. Above all it was with beauty, with his creation of beauty and his love for the thing he created. He was never irreproachable; his two novels of beauty are full of lapses in taste and of artificial prettiness; but it is impossible to deny them a fundamental honesty, and, what is more startling, an effect of reality. Notably in Carnival Mr. Mackenzie painted each lovely colour of his scene with, apparently, the hard pigment of life.