ose Victorian days, but which is
excruciatingly out of place in a modern strictly realistic novel. A
trifle, you say! Not at all! Every time "The Backwash" is mentioned, the
reader thinks: "No paper called 'The Backwash' ever existed." And a fresh
break is made in Mr. Masefield's convincingness. A modern novelist may not
permit himself these freakish negligences. Another instance of the same
fault is the Christian name of Mrs. Bailey in "The New Machiavelli." It
was immensely clever of Mr. Wells to christen her "Altiora." But in so
doing he marred the extraordinary brilliance of his picture of her. If you
insist that I am talking about trifles, I can only insist that a work of
art is a series of trifles.

* * * * *

Mr. Masefield's style suffers in a singular manner. It is elaborate in
workmanship--perhaps to the point of an excessive self-consciousness. But
its virtue is constantly being undermined by inexactitudes which irritate
and produce doubt. For example:

"They entered the tube station. In the train they could not talk much.
Lionel kept his brain alert with surmise as to the character of the
passengers. Like Blake, a century before, he found 'marks of weakness,
marks of woe,' on each face there." Blake in the tube! Mr. Masefield will
produce a much better novel than "The Street of To-day."

LECTURES AND STATE PERFORMANCES

[_25 May '11_]

Driven by curiosity I went to hear Mr. H.G. Wells's lecture last Thursday
at the _Times_ Book Club on "The Scope of the Novel." Despite the physical
conditions of heat, and noise, and an open window exactly behind the
lecturer (whose voice thus flowed just as much into a back street as into
the ears of his auditors), the affair was a success, and it is to be hoped
that the _Times_ Book Club will pursue the enterprise further. It was
indeed a remarkable phenomenon: a first-class artist speaking the truth
about fiction to a crowd of circulating-library subscribers! Mr. Wells was
above all defiant; he contrived to put in some very plain speaking about
Thackeray, and he finished by asserting that it was futile for the
fashionable public to murmur against the intellectual demands of the best
modern fiction--there was going to be no change unless it might be a
change in the direction of the more severe, the more candid, and the more
exhaustively curious.

* * * * *

Of course the lecturer had to vulgarize