Chapter I

And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot. A gloomy saying, but one which applies to men as well as to empires, and to none, perhaps, more than to those men who stand in the vanguard of literature. Of very few writers, save those who were so fortunate as to be carried away by death in the plenitude of their powers (unless, like Mr Thomas Hardy, they drew back from the battle of letters) can it be said that the works of their later years were equal to those of their maturity. The great man has his heir in the world, one who impatiently waits for his shoes and is assured that he will fill them. It is well so, for shoes must be filled, and it is good to know the claimants.

Who are these men? Is it possible already to designate them? To mark out the Hardy or the Meredith of to-morrow? The Bennett, the Wells, or the Galsworthy? It is difficult. I shall not be surprised if some quarrel with these names, cavil at the selection and challenge a greatness which they look upon as transient. Those critics may be right. I do not, in this article, attempt a valuation of those whom I will call the literary novelists, that is to say, the men who have 'somehow,' and owing to hardly ascertained causes, won their way into the front rank of modern English letters. It may be urged that these are not our big men, and that the brazen blaring of popular trumpets has drowned the blithe piping of tenderer songsters. But, if we view facts sanely, we must all agree that there are in England five men, of whom one is a foreigner, who hold without challenge the premier position among novelists: Mr Arnold Bennett, Mr Joseph Conrad, Mr John Galsworthy, Mr Thomas Hardy, and Mr H. G. Wells. Theirs is a special position: there is not one of them, probably, whose sales would create envy in the bosom of Mr Harold Bell Wright or of Mrs Barclay; nor are they of the super-hyper class whose works are issued in wisely limited editions and printed in over-beautiful type. They are, in a very rough way, the men of their time and, a very little, the men of all time. Whatever be their greatness or their littleness, they are the men who will, for the University Extension Lecturer of 1950, represent the English novel in a given period; they are not the most literary of their contemporaries; they have not more ideas than some of their contemporaries, and all of them have their faults, their mannerisms, and their lapses, but yet, in a rough and general way, these five men combine more ideas with more style than any who are beyond their group. 'Somehow' they stand at the head, and I make no attempt to criticise them, to classify them: I have even named them in alphabetical order. Now not one of these men is under forty; one is over seventy; one approaches sixty. They must be replaced. Not yet, of course, though some of the young begin, a little rashly, to cast stones at those mature glories. But still, some time, faced as we are with a horde of novelists, not less in these islands than fifteen hundred, we must ask ourselves: Who are the young men who rear their heads above the common rank? Which ones among them are likely to inherit the purple?