FICTION
STREAMERS WAVING
wears her great erudition lightly, she is prone to self-analysis, and she has fallen in love with an amiable young athlete whom circumstances allow her to' see only at very rare intervals. Her efforts to mitigate this separation constitute the action of Mr. Kitchin's book. " I have a great capacity for pleasure," she tells her doctor in the course of an imaginary conversation :—
" Provided with (thanks to Hipswcll and Holtby) over five hundred a year, no relatives to whom I must' account, no occupa- tion, no scruples, a comfortable home, charming companions, I should soar through existence, a veritable albatross of delight. Yet, what am I-? A caged linnet, an ass in the shafts, a glow- worm climbing up an arc-lamp." • •
It takes time for Miss Clame to realize that her capacity for pleasure is balanced, and soon is to be overbalanced, by a greater, capacity for pain. Mr. Kitchin has a slightly artificial, altogether delicious sense of the open air ; and in this intoxi- cating element the streamers of Miss Clame's caprice at first, wave gallantly enough. Soon they falter, they droop, they hang at half-mast. The catastrophe is affecting and beautiful ; the curtain-call, by which all the characters in turn display their proper humours on the doorstep of Miss Clame's last retreat, though over-long perhaps, would draw tears from a stone.
A kind of brilliant self-pity, subtly allying itself with one's own, is the secret of Miss Chime's almost irresistible appeal. We can forgive her for being cleverer than ourselves because, by some freak of insight, some infusion of flattery, the authOr has identified us with her. She is pathetic, but only just pathetic. Many novelists before Mr. Kitchin have broken butterflies on the wheel, and some have shown the wheel in danger from the butterfly. Miss Clame gives as good as she gets ; she would be invulnerable but for her passion.
The outlines of the book are sharp and clear, and it has a curious brittle quality that will break and splinter, one feels, but not bend. Often elliptical and at times elusive, Mr. Kitchin is never at all hazy, never leaves us in doubt as to the genuineness of his effects : his touch is staccato and precise, the lights are all turned on. His thought has a rare richness and depth of texture, and he is in turn impressionist, symbolist, romantic and realist. Yet to emphasize his capability and virtuosity would be to suggest a mechanical element in Streamers Waving that it is entirely without. It is a tour de force, inasmuch as the author " goes out " for his shots and gives a dazzling exhibition : one's instinct on putting the book down is to applaud, clap the hands and stamp the feet. But such a demonstration would not be quite fair to Mr. Kitchin, for he is genuinely serious, and his uncanny knowledge .of how a thing is done does not blind him to the importance, greater or less, of what he is doing. For fun he may invert a standard but he never misplaces one, and his irresponsibility, that starts and flickers with such charming effect, or at times less happily stiffens into per- versity, is the expression of a singularly mature and consistent attitude towards literature and towards life. There is some- thing at once defiant and defensive in this attitude, which seems to court life with one hand and repel it with the other, and yet never contradicts itself. The mannerism and pre- ciosity into which Mr. Kitchin is occasionally betrayed by this recoil from life may irritate as well as entertain ; but it is often at such moments that he is most worth reading, for his desire to annoy is as salutary as his gift to amuse.
We look forward to his next book and warn him that, with Streamers Waving still in their memory, he will have set disappointment well within the reach of all his readers.
L. P. H.
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