20 
Land & Water 
March 7, 191^ 
Modern Novels and Critics: By Hugh Walpole 
0\ returning from abroad, where I have spent 
the major part of the last four .v«irs I am 
sahited with pessimistic cries about the hnglish 
novel. In one newspaper I read : Where are 
the K.H.d old Victorian days-Oh ! for a C.eorge 
Fliot ' ■■ In another : " At no time in the history of English 
li'terature has the novel been so widely read as at present 
A new reading public has sprung into existence. tint, 
ala.s. the Knglish no%-el is in its decadence. 
\nother paper declares that it has, at last, hopes ol the 
future of the 1-ngIish novel because it has been reading a 
book that is a chronicle of actual events rather than a creative 
work "That is the line of the future English novel ! 
cries this paper. More than these individual cries, nowever, 
I notice a complete absence of anv considered criticism. In 
the reviews o( tiie novels of 1917 that appeared in certain 
papers there were ludicrous jumbles of good and bad. In 
no single review was there mention of Miss Dane s hegtment 
of Women Mr. Jovce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 
Mr. Norman Douglas's South Wind. Mr. Frank Swinnerton s 
Nocturne— a quartet that would surely give distinction to 
anv list of rontemporarv fiction in any countrv in Europe. 
Most of all. I am struck bv the invariable habit of referring 
everybody back to cvervbody else ; " Mr. Smith's novel is 
amusing.' but what a pity that it's not like Adam Bede— 
or. "Miss Green's storv reminds" us pleasantlv of Mr. Thomas 
Hardy. She has not. however, his wonderful gift of ... " 
Why should she have? .-^nd how very much better for 
Miss Green that she has not ! One Mr. Hardy is a joy and, 
a delight, but a second Miss Hardv, not quite so good, would 
onlv be a torment and a distress to us all. 
Let us consider for a moment. I am told that we have no 
living Enghsh novelists whose work will go down to posterity 
in the glorious succession of the authors of Tom Jones, Vanity 
Fair, Wulhering Heights, and the rest. I suggest that we 
have the following : Tliomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard 
Kipling, George Moore, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, May 
Sinclair, and D. H. Lawrence. This is not, I think, a bad 
Ust. and I doubt whether, at this moment, any other country 
in the world could furnish one so interesting. Let us com- 
pare this list for a moment with the English novelists of, 
say, 1850-60. There were then Dickens and Thackeray, 
Lytton and Trollope, the Brontes, and George Eliot. 
" Heavens ! " gasps the reader of The Nation. " And you 
dare to say that we can possibly lift our heads in rivalry ! " 
I do dare. 
"Yes," savs our Xonagenarian, "all very well ! But. give 
me that splendid creative power, that devil-may-rare pro- 
fusion that created without knowing that it was creating 
at :dl ! Show me a world of living, breathing figures such 
as we find in Thackeray, Dickens, and even Trollope!" 
To that I answer that there are to-day at least three worlds 
for- the Cortez of the bookshop to discover. There is that 
wonderful inexhaustible world of Henry James ; a world 
of ghosts, perhaps ; but, then, why not ? Are not ghosts 
as interesting as humans, and is not their planet, often 
enough, a rest and refreshment, especially in these days ? 
Or there is the world of Mr. Hardy — the world of the English 
countryside as it has never been revealed before, of daisies, 
and woods, and lanes, and ancient farms and pastures thick 
in grass, of Tess and Bathsheba, and Susan and Jude. of 
whose homeliness and comfort and beauty no wars and 
rumours of wars can rob us. And there is the ■ world of 
Joseph Conrad — of Sea and the East, and our own dark 
streets, a created world, if ever there was one, the world of 
Lord Jim, of Marlowe, of Nostromo, of Flora de Barrel, 
of the magic Heyst. No, I do not think, if in the continent 
of spirits such assemblies occur, that Catherine and her 
Heathcliffe will be ashamed to meet Anthony, the poet, and 
that tragic figure Ahnayer, or that Maggie Tulliver will 
smile scornfully upon Bathsheba Everdene, or Major 
Pendennis give the Bond Street cut direct to Mrs. Brook 
and her lovely Nanda, or Mr. Micawber have nothing to say 
to Mr. Kipps, Mr. Lewisham, and Mr. Polly. They are in 
the right line of descent, our heroes of to-day, and we need 
not be ashamed to sav that it is so. 
Why do we so invariably despise bur own home-grown 
products ? I have spent sorne time during the last two 
years in Russia, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. On making 
inquiries about the present state of the novel in those 
countries, I have found there are in each case only two or three 
names that justify real study. In Sweden and Norway I was 
•constantly told that here in England we had many interesting 
novelists and poets, and that our literature was becoming 
much more possible for an intelligent foreigner because it was 
shedding its old deadening hypocrisy , , , ,, ^ 
I have said a word already about the world of Mr. Conrad ; 
but reallv what is one to do with the critic who absolutely 
refuses to acknowledge his greatness 'i One can only suggest 
that he should read once again that masterpiece Nostromo, 
which has just appeared in a new edition. If that does not 
open to his eves a new world filled with new glories, then 
it is because' he is wilfuUv standing with his face to the 
wall and hugging his gloom as theone comfort left to his 
crumbling old age. Here are a crowd of characters— realistic, 
romantic, fantastic tragic— positively created out of their 
own soil. They exist— Nostromo, Antonia, IVcoud and the 
rest— not because their author has delved into his remini- 
scences and produced thence tattered remnants' of a life 
that he once himself exoerienced, but because they demanded 
of their own vitality that thev should be born. And more 
than the creation of character is here. It is, as I have said, 
the picture of a world with towns, villages, mountains, 
deserts, the sea and the river, and the silver mine brooding 
over ail. What of the Nigger of the Narcissus, what of 
Chance and the Wonderful Flora, what of The Secret Agent 
and Mr. Verloc. what of . . . ? Hut one might continue 
for ever. Conrad is as great a creative genius as any novelist 
in the whole line of English fiction. What, in heaven's 
name, do our critics want ? Do they realise that in Mr. 
George Moore thev have one of the most beautiful writers 
of iMiglish in the language, and that in Esther Waters and 
Evelvn Innes and The Lake the\- have works of first-class 
beaiitv and distinction ? 
And the tradition continues— I have not space here to 
speak at length about the younger novelists, but I challenge 
anyone to say that Mr. Beresford's Stahl Trilogy, Mr. Cannan's 
Round the Corner, and, above all, Mr. Lawrence's Sotis and 
Lovers and The Rainhoiv are not works of real importance 
and interest with a true philosophy, a creative power, and a 
vivid' picture of the life of our times. 
But I do not wish to seem here too extravagant in my 
claims for our own period. I do not suggest that all the 
novelists of our day whom I have named in this paper will 
live for ever, or that they are without fault. It is because 
there is so much room for real live criticism that I am pleading 
for a truer standard. There 'were, I know, many gifts 
bestowecj upon the earlier no\'elists that the man of to-day 
will never recapture. 
And that is of the nature of the case. In those earlier 
day», when Joseph Andrews met Mrs. Slipslop, and Tom 
Jones found "his Sophia, when Redgauntlet pursued Green- 
mantle, and Elizabeth Bennett refused Mr. Collins, there 
was a glow, a rapture of discovery that our later age has 
grown too old to know. Ours is now a different technique, 
a different philosophy, a different morality, a different form. 
Let the critic, then , recognise that it is so, and recognise it 
gladly. Let the critic of to-day not instantly hang his head 
when confronted with modern work. ^ I know that to this he 
will answer that there was never a period when more 
encouragement was given to the new man, that in any -novel- 
writer the smallest sign of originality or force is welcomed 
and praised. That is quite tnve. There is far too much 
praise, and a young writer is often so extravagantly encour- 
aged by the applause over his first and second book that he 
is the more depressed when the inevitable moment comes 
later for him to be told that he is not improving, and that 
he ought not to have swollen head, and that it is ridiculous 
of him to think that he can write nox-els. 
And even here all is not quite well. Books with obvious 
qualities of interest, such as Mr. McKenna's Sonia and 
Mr. Alec Waugh's Loom of Youth are at once acclaimed, 
but something (paieter and more unusual, like Mr. Corkerys 
beautiful Threshold ofQmet, received only two or three reviews, 
is to be seen in no bookshops, and even the publisher himself 
seems to be reluctant to deliver up copies to willing pur- 
chasers. There is no sign that the reviewer has discovered that 
this novel is literature and the others are not. He finds it 
dull ; it has no plot, he says. There are to-day, in fact, no 
standards. Our better critics— Mr. Garnett, Mr. de la Mare, 
Mr. Bailey, and others — write too seldom. There is too 
much anonymity, too much carelessness and scorn, too 
much extravagant praise, too much pessimism, and altogether 
too little balance. ' 
That is. finally, the trouble — too much patronage on one 
side and too much meaningless praise on the other. 
