dreamy,
melancholy, and beautiful as it is, with the wind blowing fragrant out
of the heart of the wood, or the rain falling on the down, seems to me
to be no more real than the scenes in As You Like It or The Tempest.
The figures are actors playing a part. And then there is through his
books so strong a note of sex, and people under the influence of
passion seem to me to behave in so incomprehensible a way, in a manner
so foreign to my own experience, that though I would not deny the truth
of the picture, I would say that it is untrue for me, and therefore
unmeaning.

I have never fallen under the sway of Rudyard Kipling. Whenever I read
his stories I feel myself for the time in the grip of a strong mind,
and it becomes a species of intoxication. But I am naturally sober by
inclination, and though I can unreservedly admire the strength, the
vigour, the splendid imaginativeness of his conceptions, yet the whole
note of character is distasteful to me. I don't like his male men; I
should dislike them and be ill at ease with them in real life, and I am
ill at ease with them in his books. This is purely a matter of taste;
and as to the animal stories, terrifically clever as they are, they
appear to me to be no more true to life than Landseer's pictures of
dogs holding a coroner's inquest or smoking pipes. The only book of his
that I re-read is The Light that Failed, for its abundant vitality and
tragicalness; but the same temperamental repugnance overcomes me even
there.

For pure imagination I should always fly to a book by H. G. Wells. He
has that extraordinary power of imagining the impossible, and working
it out in a hard literal way which is absolutely convincing. But he is
a teller of tales and not a dramatist.

Well, you will be tired of all these fussy appreciations. But what one
seems to miss nowadays is the presence of a writer of superlative
lucidity and humanity, for whose books one waits with avidity, and
orders them beforehand, as soon as they are announced. For one thing,
most people seem to me to write too much. The moment a real success is
scored, the temptation, no doubt adroitly whispered by publishers, to
produce a similar book on similar lines, becomes very strong. Few
living writers are above the need for earning money; but even that
would not spoil a genius if we had him.

These writers whom I have mentioned seem to me all like little bubbling
rivulets, each with a motion, a grace, a character of