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ness." He is as much at home with successful business men, scientists, architects, engineers, and miners as he is with artists and philosophers. I love him for his cleanness, his mental sanity, his gospel of " To take by leaving, to hold by letting go." It is certainly a mote, a blemish that he should so persistently dwell on drunkenness in women, and the necessity for divorce in the life of every man, but I like a man who can courageously rush into the market-place with a gospel of this sort : There is a free love which is neither the ludicrous complication of marriage generally understood by the term, nor a foolish denial or cowardly evasion of sex." I love him for his sense of beauty and goodness, his gentleness and kindly humour . . . but I daren't pick him out as a subject for a special article. It would occupy too much space. I have instead made a quite arbitrary selection: I could have lamented at great length on the disappearance of the Arnold Bennett who gave us The Old Wives' Tale, and the appearance of the expert journalist who gave us The Pretty Lady and The Roll-Call, both of which exhibit great talent, but no genius whatever. I could have pined (for pages) for the Wells of Mr Polly, Kipps, and Love and Mr Lewisham, and become angry that so great a humorist should have devoted to the Deity, politics, sex, and education, what should have been devoted to scientific prophecy and the comedy of the draper's assistant : I could have used up my vocabulary of eulogies on the trilogies of J. D. Beresford and Oliver Onions, and wondered sorrowfully why the former should have condescended to God's Counterpoint, and the latter to write reconstruction novels like The New Moon.

I very nearly decided to give Alec Waugh an article to himself, but I am almost alone in not con

sidering The Loom of Youth a book of surpassing genius. The Prisoners of Mainz is ever so much. better; the former was all stale news to me as I am a schoolmaster: it shows great powers of observation, but I get quickly tired of descriptions of games and caricatures of masters. Arnold Lunn and St John Lucas are much more artistic in their pictures of school life: they are so much less heavy. But it would be hard to exaggerate the importance of Alec Waugh: he has made education almost as popular a subject as spiritualism, which is all to the good... and by writing it he cleared the way for himself. He now has acquired humour, lightness, geniality, and self-confidence.

I could have written much on the childlike naïveté of Irene McLeod: Graduation is one of the few novels of the present time which exalts love in its simplest, most honourable sense. Miss M. Fulton, too, is a new writer who achieved in Blight such a success that I would willingly call attention to its merits at greater length. Then there are Middleton Murry with his very modern minute psychological study of moods and thoughts in Still Life, and Hugh Walpole, the eclectic, who lives entirely in and for his art. I suppose if I were really compelled to place my candidates in order of merit I should hesitate for a long time before deposing Hugh Walpole from the premier position, partly because he is interested in the things that interest me more than any others. In Mr Perrin and Mr Traill he started a fashion whereby it was no longer considered impossible to include schoolmasters in a novel. In The Dark Forest and The Secret City he made me even more anxious to know something of that fascinating enigma, Russia, than I had been, after labouring for years among its native writers. The Secret City is, after Forti

tude, the modern novel I would select for my desert island. Walpole's pictures of Russian cities, of Russian home-life, of the revolutions, are masterpieces and remain as concrete images in the mind long after the book is read. And . . . who can depict so well the problems that after all matter so much more to us than anything else in the world . . our relations with our fellows? "It's no use trying to keep out of things. As soon as they want to put you in-you're in. The moment you're born, you're done for." He realises the price at which a man achieves freedom: how one delivers one's soul over to another human being and is thenceforward lost. "Love's always selfish, always cruel to others, always means trouble, sorrow, and disappointment. But it's worth it, even when it brings complete disaster. Life isn't life without it." Nothing worth having can be achieved without paying enormously and I love Hugh Walpole because he can both face the fact and reckon the cost, and yet count love as worth the horrors it brings. He sees life simply as a trainingground for the immortal soul. "The secret of the mystery of life is the isolation that separates every man from his fellow-the secret of dissatisfaction, too; and the only purpose in life is to realise that isolation, and to love one's fellow-man because of it, and to show one's own courage, like a flag to which other travellers may wave their answer... life is a tragedy to every Russian simply because the daily round is forgotten by him in his pursuit of an ultimate meaning. We in the West have learnt to despise ultimate meanings as unpractical and rather priggish things." Hugh Walpole realises, as few other writers realise how the power of passion sweeps away all obstacles in its frenzy to achieve its object he has

penetrated to the secret city which is in every man's heart: "I love him so that I am blind for him and deaf for him and dead for him. . . . Before it is too late-I want it, I want him, I want happiness." Such is the poignant cry of the Russian woman unhappily married, who finds in the stolid Cambridge "Rugger Blue" the firmness and solidity and power which every woman worships more than anything else in the world. I could write at length of John Galsworthy's sensitive heart, of Miss G. B. Stern's insight into the problems of the sexes; I should like to extol Ralph Straus's strong, trenchant, healthy point of view, and Joseph Conrad's Romantic realism. Leonard Merrick's sad irony should receive its due share of praise, and Sheila Kaye Smith's masterly pictures of Sussex should not pass unnoticed. . . . I suppose there are not less than fifty writers whose books one eagerly devours year by year. At one moment we are intrigued by the queer artistry of James Joyce; the next, and Gilbert Cannan's clear, hard, polished intellect seems to us the most desirable art in the world. The war is over, and those domestic problems which once seemed very small when compared with the immanence of death and the grandeur of male friendships, now loom as large as ever. One thing only we require of those who write, that they shall be as Tchekov says, humanists to the very tips of their fingers." They must find life interesting, they, must be insatiably curious, they must write of people and things as they see them. They must have a point of view, and they should inspire us with courage and enable us to face our own difficulties. There would appear to be a sharp cleavage between the novels that matter, those which make us think, and attempt to present us with a

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picture of actualities, and those myriads of others which don't pretend to do more than amuse. There is no question that the world is made the better by those energetic spirits who feel called upon to commit to paper the thoughts that surge through them, the experiences through which they or their imaginations pass. Novel-writing is no easy task and few things make one so speechless with rage as the stupidity of those blind readers who write "vulgar rubbish " across a page of Swinnerton, or "the man with the muck-rake " on the title-page of Galsworthy. Writers have to dive deep into the bed of humanity and bring up whatever they find it is only the exception who returns with the pearl. But it requires courage to dive. The text on the cover of the Quarterly has been made the excuse of every mud-flinger for the last hundred years. It is time we realised that the best kind of criticism is pityingly silent over poverty of thought and diction, and lavish of praise where praise can honestly be given. There is so much that is good that we need never read anything else. It is obvious that we are not by any manner of means unanimous in our definition of what is good, but everybody (except George Moore) finds some reward in reading Shakespeare, so I maintain that 90 per cent. of those who read this book will be rewarded if they read the works of the authors mentioned in it. They are not all easy. It is as hard to concentrate on to Dorothy Richardson as it is on to a piece of Latin or Greek unseen, but the reward is great (sometimes) in proportion to the labour we bestow. It costs but little effort to follow the Baroness Orczy, and the recompense is slender; Conrad and Henry James demand the same mental alertness in their readers as they themselves are possessed of.