volutionary
force gathering way. Upon my soul, I love the _bloc_. But when I sit among
it, clothed in correctness, and reflect that the _bloc_ maintains me and
mine in a sort of comfort, because I divert its leisure, the humour of the
situation seems to me enormous.

* * * * *

[_11 Feb '09_]

I continue my notes on the great, stolid, comfortable class which forms
the backbone of the novel-reading public. The best novelists do not find
their material in this class. Thomas Hardy never. H.G. Wells, almost
never; now and then he glances at it ironically, in an episodic manner.
Hale White (Mark Rutherford), never. Rudyard Kipling, rarely; when he
touches it, the reason is usually because it happens to embrace the
military caste, and the result is usually such mawkish stories as "William
the Conqueror" and "The Brushwood Boy." J.M. Barrie, never. W.W. Jacobs,
never. Murray Gilchrist, never. Joseph Conrad, never. Leonard Merrick,
very slightly. George Moore, in a "Drama in Muslin," wrote a masterpiece
about it twenty years ago; "Vain Fortune" is also good; but for a long
time it had ceased to interest the artist in him, and his very finest work
ignores it. George Meredith was writing greatly about it thirty years ago.
Henry James, with the chill detachment of an outlander, fingers the
artistic and cosmopolitan fringe of it. In a rank lower than these we have
William de Morgan and John Galsworthy. The former does not seem to be
inspired by it. As for John Galsworthy, the quality in him which may
possibly vitiate his right to be considered a major artist is precisely
his fierce animosity to this class. Major artists are seldom so cruelly
hostile to anything whatever as John Galsworthy is to this class. He does
in fiction what John Sargent does in paint; and their inimical observation
of their subjects will gravely prejudice both of them in the eyes of
posterity. I think I have mentioned all the novelists who have impressed
themselves at once on the public and genuinely on the handful of persons
whose taste is severe and sure. There may be, there are, other novelists
alive whose work will end by satisfying the tests of the handful. Whether
any of these others deal mainly with the superior stolid comfortable, I
cannot certainly say; but I think not. I am ready to assert that in quite
modern English fiction there exists no large and impartial picture of the
superior stolid comfortable which could g