if one himself
is a writer, a sigh of envy--that _Nene_ has a directness, a simplicity, a
principle of internal growth or dramatic life of its own, which, alas!
most of us are incapable of attaining."

The author of _Carnival_, _Sinister Street_, _Plasher's Mead_; of those
highly comedic novels, _Poor Relations_ and _Rich Relatives_; of other and
still more diverse fiction, Compton Mackenzie, has turned to a new task.
His fine novel, _The Altar Steps_, concerns itself with a young priest of
the Church of England. We live in the England of Lytton Strachey's _Queen
Victoria_--the England of 1880 to the close of the Boer War--as we follow
Mark Lidderdale from boyhood to his ordination. _The Altar Steps_, it is
known will be followed by a novel probably to be called _The Parson's
Progress_. Evidently Mr. Mackenzie is bent upon a fictional study of the
whole problem of the Church of England in relation to our times, and
particularly the position of the Catholic party in the Church.

"Simon Pure," who writes the monthly letter from London appearing in The
Bookman (and whose identity is a well-known secret!) thus describes, in
The Bookman for September, 1922, a visit to Mr. Mackenzie:

"I have recently seen the author of _The Altar Steps_ upon his native
heath._ The Altar Steps_ is the latest work of Compton Mackenzie, and it
has done something to rehabilitate him with the critics. The press has
been less fiercely adverse than usual to the author. He is supposed to
have come back to the fold of the 'serious' writers, and so the fatted
calf has been slain for him. We shall see. My own impression is that
Mackenzie is a humorous writer, and that the wiseacres who want the novel
to be 'serious' are barking up the wrong tree. At any rate, there the book
is, and it is admitted to be a good book by all who have been condemning
Mackenzie as a trifler; and Mackenzie is going on with his sequel to it in
the pleasant land of Italy. I did not see him in Italy, but in Herm, one
of the minor Channel Islands. It took me a night to reach the place--a
night of fog and fog-signals--a night of mystery, with the moon full and
the water shrouded--and morning found the fog abruptly lifted, and the
islands before our eyes. They glittered under a brilliant sun. There came
hurried disembarking, a transference (for me, and after breakfast) to a
small boat called, by the owner's pleasantry, 'Watch Me' (Compton
Mackenzie), and then a fine sail (per moto