us, and
the lost heir to a peerage. As for 'Richard Dehan,' it is enough to
quote one of her character's remarks: 'I had drained my cup of shame to
the dregs.'

This sort of thing is produced in great abundance, and has helped to
bring the novel down. Unreality, extravagance, stage tears, offensive
piety, ridiculous abductions and machinery, because of those we have
'lost face,' like outraged Chinamen. No wonder that people of common
intelligence, who find at their friend's house drivel such as this,
should look upon the novel as unworthy. It is natural, though it is
unjust. The novel is a commodity, and if it seeks a wide public it must
make for a low one: the speed of a fleet is that of its slowest ship;
the sale of a novel is the capacity of the basest mind. Only it might be
remembered that all histories are not accurate, all biographies not
truthful, all economic text-books not readable. Likewise, it should be
remembered, and we need quote only Mr Conrad, that novels are not
defined by the worst of their kind.... It is men's business to find out
the best books; they search for the best wives, why not for the best
novels? There are novels that one can love all one's life, and this
cannot be said of every woman.

There are to-day in England about twenty men and women who write novels
of a certain quality, and about as many who fail, but whose appeal is to
the most intelligent. These people are trying to picture man, to
describe their period, to pluck a feather from the wing of the fleeting
time. They do not write about radium murders, or heroines clad in
orchids and tiger skins. They strive to seize a little of the raw life
in which they live. The claim is simple; even though we may produce two
thousand novels a year which act upon the brain in the evening as
cigarettes do after lunch, we do put forth a small number of novels
which are the mirror of the day. Very few are good novels, and perhaps
not one will live, but many a novel concerned with labour problems,
money, freedom in love, will have danced its little dance to some
purpose, will have created unrest, always better than stagnation, will
have aroused controversy, anger, impelled some people, if not to change
their life, at least to tolerate that others should do so. _The New
Machiavelli_, _Lord Jim_, _The White Peacock_, _The Rise of Silas
Lapham_, _Ethan Frome_, none of those are supreme books, but every one
of them is a hand grenade flung at the bourgeois