responsibility of heeding or
not heeding the teachings of Mahan as here sympathetically and cleverly
brought up to date."

CHAPTER XXI

THE CONFESSIONS OF A WELL-MEANING YOUNG MAN, STEPHEN MCKENNA

=i=

In a sense, all of Stephen McKenna's writing has been a confession. More
than any other novelist now actively at work, this young man bases fiction
on biographical and autobiographical material; and when he sits down
deliberately to write reminiscences, such as _While I Remember_, the
result is merely that, in addition to confessing himself, he confesses
others.

He has probably had more opportunity of knowing the social and political
life of London from the inside than most novelists of his time. In _While
I Remember_ he gives his recollections, while his memory is still fresh
enough to be vivid, of a generation that closed, for literary if not for
political purposes, with the Peace Conference. There is a power of wit and
mordant humour and a sufficiency of descriptive power and insight into
human character in all his work.

[Illustration: STEPHEN McKENNA]

_While I Remember_ is actually a gallery of pictures taken from the life
and executed with the technique of youth by a man still young--pictures of
public school and university life, of social London from the death of King
Edward to the Armistice, of domestic and foreign politics of the period,
of the public services of Great Britain at home and abroad. Though all
these are within the circle of Mr. McKenna's narrative, literary
London--the London that is more talked about than seen--is the core of his
story.

=ii=

Mr. McKenna's latest novel, _The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman_, is
a series of monologues addressed by one Lady Ann Spenworth to "a friend of
proved discretion." I quote from the London Times of April 6, 1922: "In
the course of them Lady Ann Spenworth reveals to us the difficulties
besetting a lady of rank. She is compelled to live in a house in Mount
street--for how could she ask 'The Princess' to visit her in
Bayswater?--and her income of a few thousands, hardly supplemented by her
husband's directorships, is depleted by the disbursements needed to keep
the name of her only son out of the newspapers while she is obtaining for
him the wife and the salary suited to his requirements and capacities. Mr.
Stephen McKenna provides us with the same kind of exasperating
entertainment that we get at games from watching a skilful and
uns