Young Lives by Richard Le Gallienne (1899)

This is a critical piece in my understanding of Gallienne. Up until now, I've been wondering about what his reasons were for writing as he did. His writing had always seemed to me a little bloodless, with the beefier exception of a novel from later in 1899 entitled The Worshipper of the Image, where ideas and execution married to the point of much greater wealth of impact. This one is a return, stylistically, to the novel before. It's the story of young people of the 1890s, just starting out in their lives. In that former novel, tragedy struck in the form of an interloper in a relationship. In this one there is no such challenge; the main characters, a Birkenhead (translated into 'Sidon', as against Liverpool's 'Tyre') brother and sister, have one main area of negativity in their lives: their father's conservative attitudes that won't allow them easily to pursue their modern ideals. A minor issue is also penury, but it is surprisingly quickly got over in their lives, and that of their partners; quick successes come easily to him, a writer, and her lover, an actor. Because Henry, the brother, is a writer, an excuse is given for Gallienne to outline, through a visit by him to London when he's just starting to be noticed, exactly what his lights are. I get the feeling, by the way, that this novel is largely autobiographical - Henry seems very likely to be following a good part of the author's own path. The idea he gets across, by having Henry meet some part of the avant garde of the London literary scene, is that both realism and aesthetic decadence, as they were seen at that time, were dead end reaches of the stream of literature, and that the place Henry occupied, and by association Gallienne himself, was much closer to the centre of the warm flow of literature's great river. He was "alive", they were "dead"; he was the true inheritor of the great novelists of yesterday, they were misguided. Although I can accept that this is simply what the author thinks, I have to say that I think he misunderstands a crucial issue. This is that it's not what authors' underlying notions were that determined their success, but something much more ground level and substantial, which comes down to a sense of believability in what's actually on the page and an idea of balance in verbal illustration which meant that their stories rang 'true'. It is precisely this which seems to be something which doesn't occupy Gallienne overly, meaning that his novels often feel sweet and light, like children's literature of the time, rewritten for adults with a few adult themes. He genuinely didn't think that his writing suffered by it, I think, and what I call 'sweetness' he would have called a terribly straightforward and necessary goodness, denied by dead late 19th century realism and aestheticism. Even though he is quite thin in impact as a result of espousing these angles, I can't say that it isn't interesting to read him, as it is anyone who doesn't 'fit the standard bill'. Now I need to read on, ballasted by new understanding, and see if the damage he was doing to the powerfulness of his fictions dawned on him at any further point of a very long career.