relate her fate to his decision, there is a Sadistic caress in the gentleness of his judgement of her. So in another manner Mr. Cannan fails to escape masculinity in art. There is a little of the child in him, to whom the grandiose is still the beautiful. His dramatic instinct is that of a child. He decorates the subject of realistic treatment with the artistic tinsel of the noble act.
In other respects beside his worship of humanity and his conviction of the humanity of the arts, Mr. Cannan is the victim of his too close understanding of M. Rolland. In the more casual features of technique he imitates the Frenchman’s wastefulness of material. His canvases are often prodigally crowded. It may be said of M. Rolland that only, his defects permit the intrusion of his virtues, for it is in the vignettes drawn by the way and frequently little related to his central purpose that he has given us the delicate flavour of his insight into isolated lives, and his expression of them is almost lyric. Cannan, on the contrary, would much better leave us with a clear vision of his original purpose. A character is drawn from the over-pregnant depths and presented to us with an incisiveness that makes us disproportionately hopeful that it will develop significance. We feel almost defrauded when it drops back into quiescent obscurity and we are allowed no further acquaintance with it than comes in a bare allusion at the proper place. Visualization is wasted on minor folk and incident, and the large figures on the canvas sometimes remain featureless through a whole volume.
In Mr. Cannan's more frankly discursive and abstract writing, such as The Anatomy of Society, Satire, Samuel Butler: A Critical Study, and Freedom, there is a general absence of the swift and unaccountable vision which is the best thing he has to give us. The occasional flare of intuition is gone, and without this to illumine his language his words lack the decisiveness and precision which harmoniously render the austerities of argument and exposition. But if I would speak of him at his worst I should recall a rhymed diatribe: against English politics named Noel, with the subtitle (Heaven forefend that it be taken seriously!) An Epic—oh, Puritan Epic fit to have been composed in New England!
It is a relief to turn to his plays—one wishes there were more of them. James and John is a dramatic episode in one act. It fails of the title of drama because when the curtain goes up on the two sons and the mother waiting for the return of the prodigal father
