ires a weariness
of all other pictures that are not absolutely first rate, giving them a
disconcerting affinity to the tops of chocolate-boxes or to "art"
photographs, I have permitted myself to suspect that supposing some writer
were to come along and do in words what these men have done in paint, I
might conceivably be disgusted with nearly the whole of modern fiction,
and I might have to begin again. This awkward experience will in all
probability not happen to me, but it might happen to a writer younger than
me. At any rate it is a fine thought. The average critic always calls me,
both in praise and dispraise, "photographic"; and I always rebut the
epithet with disdain, because in the sense meant by the average critic I
am not photographic. But supposing that in a deeper sense I were?
Supposing a young writer turned up and forced me, and some of my
contemporaries--us who fancy ourselves a bit--to admit that we had been
concerning ourselves unduly with inessentials, that we had been worrying
ourselves to achieve infantile realisms? Well, that day would be a great
and a disturbing day--for us.

1911

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

[_12 Jan. '11_]

The practice of reviewing the literature of the year at the end thereof is
now decaying. Newspapers still give a masterly survey of the motor-cars of
the year. I remember the time when it was part of my duty as a serious
journalist to finish at Christmas a two-thousand word article, full of
discrimination as fine as Irish lace, about the fiction of the year; and
other terrifying specialists were engaged to deal amply with the remaining
branches of literature. To-day, one man in one column and one day will
polish off what five of us scarcely exhausted in seven columns and seven
days. I am referring to the distant past of a dozen years ago, before
William de Morgan was born, and before America and Elinor Glyn had
discovered each other. Last week many newspapers dismissed the entire
fiction of 1910 in a single paragraph. The consequence is that there has
been no "book of the year." A critic without space to spread himself
hesitates to pronounce downright for a particular book. A critic engaged
in the dangerous art of creating the "book of the year" wants room to
hedge, and in the newest journalism there is no room to hedge. So the
critic refrains from the act of creation. He imitates the discretion of
the sporting tipster, who names several horses as being likely to win o