Review:Sinclair:The Romantic (S.H.H.)

Review:Bury:The Idea of Progress (R.F.)

Review:Sinclair:The Romantic (S.H.H.) written by Author:S. H. H.

Review:Gibbon:The Conquering Hero (L.T.R.)

From The Canadian Forum, December 1920, p. 88

The Romantic, by May Sinclair (Macmillan). There are, out of "the monstrous regiment of women" whose prolific pens give birth to the yearly brood of novels that go to feed the all-devouring maw of an uncritical public, four names that stand out by themselves — May Sinclair, Ethel Sidgwick, Dorothy Richardson, and Rose Macaulay. To any of their work that appears we give the same serious attention that we give to a new novel by H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Hugh Walpole, or Compton Mackenzie. They all have 'the innocent eye', they see things freshly. Their technique is original, even exciting. They have a power of psychological analysis possessed by hardly any save the best of our men novelists. Of the four, Miss Sinclair, with her philosopher's cloak, is most strongly attracted by the unusual, the abnormal, in mental life.

The day of the authoritative, ex-cathedra review is gone, long ago. Your modern reviewer can find sermons in stones and good in everything, and this is wise, because nowadays most reviewers write novels and most novelists write reviews. But now, with no novel of my own hanging in the offing, I am going to say quite frankly that I don't like Miss Sinclair's last novel, The Romantic. I doubt whether Mr. Chesterton would find it satisfactory as regards the Athanasian creed, and its utter lack of mediaeval leanings would not commend it to Mr. Belloc. But my own private quarrel is on quite other grounds. I am a romantic at heart. It is my private secret. John Trenchard, Lord Jim, Tom Lingard, of such is the Kingdom of Romance. They dream dreams, see visions, they know that you cannot touch a flower without troubling of a star. I sit in a corner in the dark and hug myself in silence in their company. I dream their dreams after them. Of course your Romantic always gives himself away, that is part of the game.

Now, I expected from the title that I was about to add another to my company. I was ready to forgive a shady past, to overlook much in the manner of his upbringing, if only he proved to be of the company.

It seems to me that Miss Sinclair has really laid herself open to an action for libel. Her 'Romantic' turns out to be nothing else but a degenerate, an unspeakably horrible degenerate. In the effort of the life-force, or what ever 'It' may be called, to right the defect of this congenital degeneracy, John Conway, 'The Romantic', save the mark, commander of a Red Cross unit, commits the basest crimes and is finally shot in the back by the servant of a Belgian officer whom he is in the act of abandoning. Miss Sinclair's psychological analysis is as penetrating as ever, her descriptive style as crisp and trenchant as ever, but — but, the book is simply distasteful to me, with all its forcefulness. John Conway is artistically inadequate; I gladly abandon him to the psycho-therapists and forget him.

S. H. H.