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330 like Mr Mackenzie, simply because he is satisfied to write about what he knows, not complicating it with any striving to attain a point of view not his own, may produce an interesting or even valuable document. Mr Mackenzie is better worth reading than many more pretentious and sophisticated writers. He is not admired by the intellectuals, but on the other hand there is a popularity which he will never attain. No book of his will ever have the success of If Winter Comes.

I should be sorry to see this type of novel disappear, unless it is to be replaced by something better. Another interesting type, but of a very short ancestry, is the psychoanalytic type, notably illustrated by Miss Sinclair's Harriett Frean and by a less finished, but commendable book, Miss E. B. Stern’s The Room. In Miss Sinclair's book a method seems to have been carried about as far as it will go; and because it is a scientific method, and rests upon a dubious and contentious branch of science, I doubt whether even Miss Sinclair can carry it much further. Miss Stern does not reduce us to quite the state of lucid despair of Miss Sinclair, but that is because she does not carry the method so far. The conclusion of Miss Sinclair's book (it has already been reviewed in —I only refer to it in describing a type) extracts as much pity and terror as can be extracted from the materials: but because the material is so clearly defined (the soul of man under psychoanalysis) there is no possibility of tapping the atmosphere of unknown terror and mystery in which our life is passed and which psychoanalysis has not yet analysed. So that if I may predict, it is that Miss Sinclair will find herself forced to proceed from psychotherapy even to the supernatural, or at least to that transfinite world with which Henry James was in such close intercourse.

Both Miss Sinclair and Miss Stern—this type of fiction would appear to be practised rather by women, and rather by extremely intelligent women—are too shrewd, I imagine, to pass on to the third or Dostoevsky type of novel. I recall one very interesting essay in this kind, Mr Murry's Still Life, an excellent study of a peculiarly revolting form of spiritual corruption: but the method has produced more failures than successes. All novelists are dangerous models for other novelists, but Dostoevsky—a Russian, known only through one translation—is especially dangerous. For the method is only permissible if you see things the way Dostoevsky saw them.