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Rh confound tragedy with circumstance. He is a man of brilliant beginnings, but unless he can come to a clearer understanding of himself he cannot save his initial creative impulses from exhausting themselves for lack of direction. In The Anatomy of Society there is a chapter on definitions. Let Mr. Cannan begin the new chapter of his own endeavour by a definition of his intentions toward art. Volume after volume from his pen has the air of a spiritual experiment. It is as though he asked of his art that it give him something beyond life—a groping for a God outside who will complete what is begun on paper. After the first immediate recognition of an experience, one detaches from it cause and effect, which are always exterior to consciousness even if contained, as a sensation or an idea, in the man himself. Thirdly, one abstracts from the experience a quality inclusive of both cause and effect and in this synthesis arrives at the ideal. When one emotionalizes such a synthesis, one becomes romantic. Of the first kind of reaction which reflects life in an utterance clouded with a mist of the senses as though yet warm with the steaming heat of the body, there is little evidence in Mr. Cannan's pages. The modern tendency in art is a fumbling after the source of those things which die as they find the full light of intellectualization. Mr. Cannan discovers himself somewhere midway between the inscrutable impulse which eludes articulation and the formulated expression which is the end of conjectural writing. The intuitive plane is that on which the intelligence is yet actuated by a rudimentary urge, and the wits, sharpened by unrecognized instincts, motivate and direct expression along devious courses. Only intuition could have sensed a psychological situation so involved as (in Old Mole) the relation between father and son hinted at in the synopsis of the early life of Cuthbert Jones, alias Timmis. In another place in the same book Cannan says: "He had developed a habit of talking and did not know it. She had taken refuge in silence and was aware of it." This is an almost inspired observation on the complementary reactions of the characters implicated. Or in another story: "Because he made her laugh she distrusted him the more." Again and again such detail is wasted as the story shatters nebulously about Mr. Cannan's dominant conception of humanity as a unit—a monstrous generality.

There is something of the Puritan in the person who demands an intelligible order of his universe, and dresses his art in man-made