of Jenny ten years hence or of Emmy as a baby. The fickle Alf is one of
the most perfect Cockneys--a type so easy to caricature and so hard to
get true--in fiction. If there exists a better writing of vulgar
lovemaking, so base, so honest, so touchingly mean and so touchingly
full of the craving for happiness than this that we have here in the
chapter called _After the Theatre_, I do not know of it. Only a
novelist who has had his troubles can understand fully what a dance
among china cups, what a skating over thin ice, what a tight-rope
performance is achieved in this astounding chapter. A false note, one
fatal line, would have ruined it all. On the one hand lay brutality; a
hundred imitative louts could have written a similar chapter brutally,
with the soul left out, we've loads of such "strong stuff" and it is
nothing; on the other side was the still more dreadful fall into
sentimentality, the tear of conscious tenderness, the redeeming glimpse
of "better things" in Alf or Emmy that would at one stroke have
converted their reality into a genteel masquerade. The perfection of Alf
and Emmy is that at no point does a "nature's gentleman" or a "nature's
lady" show through and demand our refined sympathy. It is only by
comparison with this supreme conversation that the affair of Keith and
Jenny seems to fall short of perfection. But that also is at last
perfected, I think, by Jenny's final, "Keith.... Oh, Keith!..."

Above these four figures again looms the majestic invention of "Pa."
Every reader can appreciate the truth and humour of Pa, but I doubt if
any one without technical experience can realise how the atmosphere is
made and completed and rounded off by Pa's beer, Pa's needs, and Pa's
accident, how he binds the bundle and makes the whole thing one, and
what an enviable triumph his achievement is.

But the book is before the reader and I will not enlarge upon its merits