erature a thing of 'positive substantives' and 'dynamic
verbs'--when Mr Peguy repeats over and over again the same sentence
because, in his view, that is how we think--we smile. We are both right
and wrong to smile, for these people express in the wrong way that which
is the right thing. The modern novel has and must have a new
significance. It is not enough that the novelist should be cheery as
Dickens, or genially cynical as Thackeray, or adventurous as Fielding.
The passions of men, love, hunger, patriotism, worship, all these things
must now be shared between the novelist and his reader. He must
collaborate with his audience ... emulate the show-girls in a revue,
abandon the stage, and come parading through the stalls. A new passion
is born, and it is a complex of the old passions; the novelist of to-day
cannot end as Montaigne, say that he goes to seek a great perhaps. He
needs to be more positive, to aspire to know what we are doing with the
working-class, with the Empire, the woman question, and the proper use
of lentils. It is this aspiration towards truth that breaks up the old
form: you cannot tell a story in a straightforward manner when you do
but glimpse it through the veil of the future.

And so it goes hard with Edwin and Angeline. We have no more time to
tell that love; we need to break up their simple story, to consider
whether they are eugenically fitted for each other, and whether their
marriage settlement has a bearing upon national finance. Inevitably we
become chaotic; the thread of our story is tangled in the threads which
bind the loves of all men. We must state, moralise, explain, analyse
motives, because we try to fit into a steam civilisation the old
horse-plough of our fathers. I do not think that we shall break the old
plough; now and then we may use it upon sands, but there is much good
earth for it to turn.

Sincerity: the Publisher and the Policeman

There is always much talk of sincerity in literature. It is a favourite
topic in literary circles, but often the argument sounds vain, for
English literature seldom attains sincerity; it may never do so until
Englishmen become Russians or Frenchmen, which, in spite of all
temptations, they are not likely to do.

Once upon a time we had a scapegoat ready, the circulating libraries,
for they made themselves ridiculous when they banned _Black Sheep_ and
_The Uncounted Cost_, while every now and then they have banned a book
of artisti