PREFACE

LET me make it quite clear at the outset: I have laid no claims to be thought a literary critic: the following papers are not studies in literature. While other men were more healthily and patriotically employed in digging up their allotments and gardens, for physical reasons I was forced to confine myself to the garden of my mind, by no means a fruitful soil: I have but little creative genius: abandoning this barren task I then began to dig in the gardens of other men's minds: this book is the result. All I have sought to do has been to convey some of the pleasure I have gained from desultory reading of all kinds during the last few years, to those who take the trouble to turn these pages the art of criticism is not mine. I have not obtruded my own personality more than was absolutely necessary. I have merely walked about prolific vineyards and orchards and plucked a cluster of grapes here, a plum there, to entice you to share some of my golden pleasures. That I have missed some of the best will be obvious to any one who looks at the chapter-headings; that I have included much unripe and indigestible, or over-ripe and putrid fruit I beg leave to deny. There was so much that was very good that I could have filled another volume with ease. Some of these essays have already appeared in print. For permission to include them in this volume I wish to thank the editors of The Fortnightly Review and To-day.

PART I

NOVELISTS AND NOVELS

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Oh, it's only a novel... only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineations of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language."

I

I

INTRODUCTORY

HAVE lately read a book by W. L. George (who

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appears to write with equal facility about everything) on the Modern Novel. I remember to have been astounded at his selection of authors: now that I, in my turn, find that I want to say something about the novel I can already hear the critic saying, What an amazing selection." It is quite impossible to make a class list. It is like the competition of finding out which is the best of Keats' five Odes, or Shakespeare's greatest tragedy. I have no favourite author. The last time I dared to write generally of the modern author I was taken to task for omitting to mention Charles Marriott. It never struck my critic on that occasion, I suppose, that there are writers who dare not talk about some things because the temptation to fill volume after volume would be so strong. There are moods when Marriott's are the only novels I can rely on to restore me to mental health: I know no man who can make the other sex live as he makes it live: do you remember the passage in Mrs Alemere's Elopement where Dick meets Evelyn again, loving her body, she loving him not at all: "She must despise him for his self-restraint when she was under his protection"? It is a terribly merciless rending of the veil. I love Marriott for his epigrammatic style, his vivid grasp of essentials both in scenic descriptions and in analysis of character: I love him for his "all-round