Literary Close-ups

V. May Sinclair. A Pen Portrait by a Friendly Hand

HUGH WALPOLE

IF votes were taken in any group of reading, thinking people, as to the leading English woman novelist of our time most of them would go, I have no doubt at all, to Miss May Sinclair. Edith Wharton would receive some, Mrs. Humphrey Ward a few, and there would be one or two others with a vote or two apiece, but most certainly most of them would go to Miss Sinclair. This is rather a remarkable thing when one reflects that, during the twentyfive years that she has published novels she has never once compromised with her ideals of art, never once written a line that was not the best that she could at the time write, never once cheapened her fine and precious talent for anyone or anything. Twenty-five years is a long writing period; in 1895 all kinds of strange birds were twittering on the trees and Miss Sinclair's two first books, "Mr. and Mrs. Neville Tyson" and "Two Sides of the Question" were undoubtedly influenced by the back-wash of the "Yellow Book" time, with its intensity, its French atmosphere, its myopic Pierrots and its search for the right word.

Then came "The Divine Fire" and she stepped, like Alice, over the brook into her rightful kingdom.

It was after this book that May Sinclair became a figure in London literary life. My first impression of her, I remember, was at that most terrible of functions, a literary tea-party, held in a small room somewhere underground off the Strand. The room was desperately crowded and everyone was holding his or her cup of tea clutched tightly to his or her breast or bosom lest the precious thing should be brushed away and hurled into thin air. All faces had that strange mixture of fear and expectation that belongs so especially to a literary tea-party and when it was suddenly announced that Mr. W. W. Jacobs was in the room the movement towards where he was supposed to be was so sudden that the air was rent with apologies for tea-upsettings. It was in the middle of this hubbub that someone said to me: "That's May Sinclair over there," and clutching my cup more firmly than ever in my right hand I craned my eyes round to where a little woman was standing, terror in her eyes, crushed between two stout persons who were talking over her head, a piece of bread-and-butter in one hand and a saucer in another, the tea-cup nowhere to be seen. That little picture had become almost symbolical to me since, so typical was it of May Sinclair's determination that whatever her own sufferings may be she will hurt no one; her patience, her courtesy, and her gentleness.

The Flat in Kensington

A FEW weeks after the tea-party I saw her in more spacious surroundings. She asked me to go and have tea with her in her Kensington flat. That is now a good many years ago and all I can remember of that flat is that it had one magnificently large room with high broad windows that looked onto trees, a gleaming polished floor, bright blue bowls filled with flowers and, of course, a cat. It sends back to me even through this distance of time that impression of cleanliness, order, colour, light and space that are always to be found as May Sinclair's background: How she must have hated and loathed that tea-party! But she went to it of course because of that passion for the art that she practices. I know many novelists, male and female, British and foreign, but I know no one in any country with that same passion so fiercely developed. I remember that on that day in the Kensington Hat my own young mind was fixed upon a grandiose scheme of a trilogy that was to knock Tolstoi's "War and Peace" and Rolland's "Jean Christophe" to little bits, both for length and grandeur. Egotistically I outlined my scheme and May Sinclair, although she must have wondered both at my cheek and my immaturity, threw herself into my plans with an enthusiasm and eagerness that could not have been exceeded had the great Tolstoi bimseif stood before her. Then as now she was immensely preoccupied with questions of technique and at the time was greatly under the influence of the late Henry James. Indeed so deeply all her life has she been sunk in the problems of style and method and construction that it has always been a marvel to me that her novels are so spontaneous, so completely sprung from a life of their own.

A remember that I felt that day in Kensing ton to be a rather hushed and subdued affair and I think, in May Sinclair's company, one does often seem to be talking in a whisper not at all because anything has to be concealed but simply because life is so wonderful that it's audacious to shout about it. And that does not mean that she has not a sense of humour; she has an excellent one and nobody enjoys better than she does jokes against herself, jokes that have their origin as a rule in sudden spontaneous generosities to the undeserving poor.

Nor does this hushed atmosphere mean that May Sinclair does not face life. No reader of her books could for a moment suppose that she does not, but I doubt whether anything finer was done in the whole of the war than her raising and supporting of an ambulance corps in Belgium, her own personal service in it, her pluck and humour and poetry in the course of it: we all remember the use that she made of it in the art of "The Belfry."

Nevertheless in spite of that experience she has a real horror of melodrama. She warned me against the dangers of it years ago and has always since chided me for my use of it in my various works. She is herself very sensitive to criticism; I will venture the suggestion that there is no author alive who is not. Yet she has never allowed adverse criticism to affect her loyalties. Years ago, being young and ambitions, I reviewed her book, "The Creators," with what I then believed was acute and trenchant perception.

She was distressed, we discussed the affair and I am glad to think that we were both of us entirely honest and plain-spoken and friends when it was over. "The Creators" was a far finer book than I had at that time the wit to perceive, but I think that there has always been in all her work a certain quality, a kind of feminine insistence on truths and attitudes that has irritated the reviewer, There appeared only this year in the London "Times" the stupidest, blindest, most prejudiced notice of her book "Mary Olivier" that man could conceive, and so it will be, I expect, to the end of the chapter.

No work so individual, so personal, so determined in its artistic and ethical honesty can avoid detractors, and it is well that it should be so.

The House in St. John's Wood

NOW in her house in St. John's Wood May Sinclair maintains exactly the atmosphere of her Kensington flat of ten years ago—the same light, the same space and cleanliness and order, the same love of daintiness and colour, the same precision and neatness, the same abundance of books and etchings and Japanese prints, the same black cat.

It is pleasant to think that there is no author alive in England to-day, who is so little grudged her success by her competitors, who has so many warm and loyal friends among all the fraternity of her own craft. She has finally, a great importance for us of her immediate generation because, more than any writer of her time she is putting the older literary traditions into touch with the new.

We shall have at least one novelist who will never fail in her appreciation of and encouragement for the younger writers. So long as May Sinclair is with us we know that there will be at least one foe to pessimism, retrograde lamentations, exaltations of the glorious past over a miserable and perishing present. May Sinclair is the finest link that our literature of to-day has with the great literature of the future.