It is disheartening that so influential a person
as Mr. Lewis should be fooled by this sort of thing.
So there is something intensely irritating to us (although we admire
Mr. Lewis) in that "_She belongs, she understands, she is definitely
an artist._" In the first place, that use of the word _artist_ as
referring to a writer always gives us qualms unless used with great
care. Then again, _She belongs_ somehow seems to intimate that there
is a registered clique of authors, preferably those who come down
pretty heavily upon the disagreeable facts of life and catalogue
them with gluttonous care, which group is the only one that counts.
Now we are strong for disagreeable facts. We know a great many. But
somehow we cannot shake ourself loose from the instinctive
conviction that imagination is the without-which-nothing of the art
of fiction. Miss Stella Benson is one who is not unobservant of
disagreeables, but when she writes she can convey her satire in
flashing, fantastic absurdity, in a heavenly chiding so delicate and
subtle that the victim hardly knows he is being chidden. The
photographic facsimile of life always seems to us the lesser art,
because it is so plainly the easier course.
We fear we are not acute enough to explain just why it is that Mr.
Lewis's salute to Mrs. Scott bothers us so. But it does bother us a
good deal. We have nourished ourself, in the main, upon the work of
two modern writers: Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad; we
like to apply as a test such theories as we have been able to glean
from those writers.
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