SOURCE: “Novelists of the Modern Renaissance,” in The Scottish Novel: From Smollett to Spark, Harvard University Press, 1978, pp. 207-45.

In the following excerpt, Hart considers the melodramatic story line of Mackenzie's The Four Winds of Love.

When Compton Mackenzie began publishing The Four Winds of Love in 1937, he had already enjoyed a quarter-century of recognition as one of the younger English novelists praised by Henry James and as a fabulous cloak and dagger figure of World War I. Sinister Street (1914), a romance of Oxford and of London's underworld in which Michael Fane's Oxonian chivalry confronts Sylvia Scarlett's Petronian neo-Calvinism, seemed to some a book of genius. Frank Swinnerton thought Mackenzie “one of the few writers able to dramatize the Cockney scene” but inclined, when inspiration lagged, “to relapse into romance, Cornishness, and a rather fin de siècle emotionalism.”¹ There is much in the early novels that anticipates...