Dear Geoffrey Whitworth,—Considering for how many ages how many clever people have been complaining of their publishers, you might have supposed that no device for getting one of them into a scrape could have been left untried. Yet, so far as I can remember, no author has had the bright idea of denouncing his publisher, particularly, and by name, as accessory before the fact. I am willing to suspect my memory rather than my profession of being at fault in this matter; but that the practice is uncommon is most certain and that, surely, is very strange. No author thinks twice of saddling his friend, his wife, his mother, or even his mistress with the responsibility of having been the onlie begetter of some feckless cub or monstrous abortion; but on his publisher, the very man he should wish to injure, who ever thought of fastening the offence? Yet you cannot deny, my dear Whitworth, that this book is your fault. I was all for abandoning the project after I had read Mr. Arnold Bennett's volume and recognized how much more readable his journalism was than mine: your reader, I suspect, was of like mind: it was you, and you alone, who, by enlisting my vanity, conquered my pride.

Of course in the end my vanity might have triumphed without you: it is not often or easily beaten.

I can imagine myself printing under that classic excuse, which has the merit of being in the grand literary tradition and as disingenuous as another; for in these days an author is not more hungry than every one else, and my friends would have been the first to pardon my silence. You may take it for certain, by the way, that when a man says he is publishing at the instance of two or three friends he means that he is offering the public what he knows that the public could have done perfectly well without. He means that he is printing neither to persuade nor to inform nor yet to express the truth that is in him, but simply to gratify an itch for such notoriety as the careless attention of a few thousand readers may be supposed to give. If I now contrive to escape the consequences of my own axiom it is thanks to you, My Publisher—or Publisher's representative must I say? (You are so very modest, my dear Whitworth, and so exact.) Naturally, by so obliging me you have made me your friend for life. But that was ex post facto.

I said just now that when I read Mr. Bennett's "Books and Persons," I was for abandoning a project about which, you will do me the justice of remembering, I was lukewarm from the first. I enjoyed immensely his lively papers and I felt pretty sure that no one would so enjoy mine. Your reader was good enough to point out some reasons, besides the obvious one, why this must be so; and in self-defence I am going to remind you of them. When Mr. Bennett wrote for the New Age he was a famous and full-grown author, very much at his ease, very much at his liberty, well aware that if he said what he pleased as he pleased his editor would be only too happy to print it. When I wrote most of the reviews reprinted in this volume I was commencing journalism, and I wrote them for the AthenÆum.

The AthenÆum, the editor of which I take this opportunity of thanking for permission to reprint my articles, is a paper, was, at any rate, a paper with ancient and peculiar customs; and of these customs perhaps the most peculiar was that, while allowing its contributors extraordinary liberty in some matters, it sustained what may perhaps be described as a literary policy. Like other venerable institutions, the AthenÆum had a taste for unwritten law; its policy was adumbrated rather than defined, but few contributors, I believe, were unconscious of its existence. Not one of us, I am sure, would have expressed anything but what he thought and felt, but we all hoped that our thoughts and feelings would not be too dissimilar from those of our presiding genius, Athene the wise, our eponymous goddess; because, if they were, her high-priest, albeit one of the most charming and accomplished people in Fleet Street or thereabouts, stood ready with the inexorable blue pencil to smite once and smite no more. In the matter of expression, too, Her Omniscience was, to my mind, something over-exacting. Concision is an excellent quality in a writer. We all know what Ben Jonson said about Shakespeare and we all agree with him. Still, when, by the shape of one's paragraphs, the balance of one's sentences, and the internal rhythm of one's clauses, one fancies that an article has been raised almost to the perfection of a work of art, it is disappointing to find a line cut out here, two more there, half a dozen missing from the second galley, and from the third a whole paragraph gone for no better reason than that they are not essential to the argument—especially when one is persuaded that they are.

I have said that the editor of the AthenÆum, in my time, was a charming and accomplished writer; he is also my very good friend and too generous critic, and I should be a wretch if I did not love him. But on the evening when a weekly paper goes to press, when the pages are pouring in, and some one, as likely as not, is waiting at the CafÉ Royal, even the most cultivated and considerate of editors will be an editor. Wherefore I must now plague you and my readers with a word or two in explanation of my method of correction and revision. Re-reading these articles—some of which were written nine or ten years ago—I come on such phrases as "this is a notable achievement," "his equipment is not really strong," and I wonder, of course, what the devil I did say. No doubt it was something definite and particular, for in those days I was a most conscientious writer; but what subtle limitation, what delicately suggested reference, what finely qualifying phrase, what treasure of my critical nonage lies buried beneath this "getting out" formula I cannot now remember. I read the article again and again but I want the courage and energy to read again the book about which it was written. And, if I did, should I recapture precisely what I thought or felt and tried, by means of that lost clause or sentence, not to leave quite unexpressed? The idea is gone, and with it, no doubt, the complete significance of the article. I have botched and cobbled, but at best I have but patched a rent. I hope, however, that I have not spared many of those trusty veterans who, occasionally even in our best weekly and regularly in our morning and evening papers, are expected to do duty for sense.

Wherever the blue pencil or standardized phrase has left too deep a wound or gross a blemish I have had to rewrite. And, as I have rarely succeeded in recovering the original idea, I have had to borrow from my later thought. Of such patching I have been as thrifty as possible: also, I have not attempted to square the opinions and sentiments of early days with my later pronouncements, so, I make no doubt, some very clever readers will have the pleasure of catching me in inconsistency. If they are really clever they will catch me in worse things than that, in puerility for instance, and affectation, to say nothing of blasphemy and sedition. As for consistency, I seem consistently to have cared much for four things—Art, Truth, Liberty and Peace. I was never much in sympathy with my age.

With my youthful style I should not venture to tamper even were I conscious of any important change in my theory of composition or power of expression. And I am not. I write more fluently nowadays and therefore, probably, worse. It cannot be helped. It charms me to notice as I read these essays with what care and conscience they are done. Magna cum cura atque diligentia scripsit—they are not far from Latin Grammar days. Precisely on account of these qualities they have suffered much from editorial amendment, and on their account I have been conservative in a matter where another policy would, I dare say, have been more to the taste of some connoisseurs. The matter in question is that of the grand editorial "We." That, as you may suppose, was the person in which Pallas habitually addressed her attentive suppliants; that was the person in which these articles were written; and experiment has shown that to substitute "I," "my," and "mine" for "we," "our," and "ours," destroys invariably the texture of the prose. Whether this early prose of mine was good is not for me to decide; but that it was closely knit is indisputable, and a sensitive critic who cared to tease himself with trifles could discover, I fancy, from stylistic evidence, just which passages have been interpolated.

The articles borrowed from the Burlington Magazine, the Nation, the New Statesman, the International Journal of Ethics, and the Cambridge Magazine—to the editors of which I herewith tender customary thanks for customary favours—all having appeared over my signature were, of course, all written in the first person singular. Any one who did me the honour of reading my book, "Art," so attentively as now to notice that to its making went certain quarryings from these articles, will have enjoyed it enough, I hope, not to resent being occasionally reminded of it.

And here I might end a tedious letter: but first, if you will bear with me, I should like to say a word on a subject in which both you and I are interested. I have shown so much humility in contrasting these reviews with those of Mr. Bennett that I will permit myself one comment, by no means in disparagement of "Books and Persons," but in the hope that he, or indeed any one who concerns himself with literary criticism, may profit by it. In one respect I do fancy myself a better critic than Mr. Bennett; for though, doubtless, I lack most of those qualities that make his book a positive pleasure to read, I lack also his indiscrimination. Partly, this comes of my not being what he calls himself—"a creative artist," just as it results in my not using that term when I mean "an intelligent person"; but chiefly it is that I am, I believe, almost free from that "provincialism in time"—if I may coin a phrase—which is what is most amiss with Mr. Bennett's critical apparatus. It is a great pity Mr. Bennett should be provincial in any sense, for in the common he is not; on the contrary, he is one who has lived in France, even as Frenchmen live there, without being more than a little shocked. He has read a good many books, both old and new; he is one who cares for literature manifestly: then why does he call Mr. H. G. Wells a great imaginative artist? I will not swear to the epithets—I have not his book by me—but I am sure he is too candid to deny that if he has not used them he has used their equivalents. This much I know he has said—for I made a note when I read the essay—"astounding width of observation, a marvellously true perspective, an extraordinary grasp of the real significance of innumerable phenomena utterly diverse, profound emotional power, dazzling verbal skill." Now, my dear Whitworth, if I were to say that sort of thing about Marivaux you would raise your eyebrows—you know you would. Yet I suppose no competent judge of literature will pretend that the novels of Marivaux—to say nothing of the comedies—are inferior to those of Mr. Wells. Pray read again "Le Paysan Parvenu"—all except the eighth and last part, about which I can't help thinking there is some mystery—and then try "Mr. Britling." But if by Mr. Bennett's standards we are to give Marivaux his due, what is there left to say about Shakespeare?

Provincialism in time is as fatal to judgment as the more notorious sort, and a defective sense of proportion is at the root of both. Consider English novelists of the last hundred years. Who but a fool dare predict confidently for any living Englishman, save Hardy, so much immortality as belongs to Galt's "Annals of the Parish," or Mrs. Oliphant's "Beleagured City"? Now what figure, think you, would a critic cut who besprinkled these writers with such compliments as Mr. Bennett peppers his contemporaries withal? You need not answer. Mr. Bennett is a friend of the firm.

Had Mr. Bennett lost his head about contemporaries who were attempting to solve new artistic problems I could understand it. Young writers wax over-enthusiastic about Laforgue and Charles-Louis Philippe—both of whom, by the way, died some years ago—and are not much to blame on that account; neither should I have the least difficulty in forgiving myself were it to turn out—as it will not—that I had said too much in praise of Matisse or Picasso. The artist who even appears to have discovered or rediscovered an instrument of expression or to have extended by one semitone the gamut of Æsthetic experience is bound to turn the best heads of his age. Were it possible to overrate CÉzanne, not to do so would be a mark of insensibility. I was never much impressed by those superior persons of an earlier age who from the first saw through Wagner; there was a time when to dislike Wagner was, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a sign not of superiority but of stupidity. The artists, however, whom Mr. Bennett belauds so uncritically, are not of this sort. In my judgment, Mr. Wells, Mr. George Moore, and the late Sir John Galsworthy are not artists at all: be that as it may, past question they are artistically conventional and thoroughly in the tradition of British fiction. Of course they write of motor-cars and telephones where an older generation wrote of railway-trains and telegrams, and of the deuxiÈmes, troisiÈmes or quatre-vingt-dixiÈmes where their grandmothers wrote of les premiers amours; also, they can refer to the Almighty in the third person without bursting into capitals. But in this there is no more artistic novelty than there would be in a picture of an aeroplane painted in the manner of Ingres. Neither is there any discredit; very much the same might be said of our three best living novelists—Hardy, Conrad, and Virginia Woolf, all of whom are more or less traditional, as is Anatole France, perhaps the best novelist alive. A first-rate unconventional work of art is not a straw better than a conventional one, and to become slightly light-headed about either is not only permissible but seemly. Nevertheless, to go silly over a mediocre innovation is far more excusable than to be taken in by its equivalent in a familiar style. While to rave about Messrs. Wells, Moore and Galsworthy seems to me shocking. Surely there can be no difficulty about treating these writers as ordinary citizens of the Republic of Letters—a state, let us try to remember, that not only extends in space beyond the horizons of Tooting but in time beyond the Edwardian and even the Victorian era.

A critic, I submit, should judge a work of art, not in relation to the age and circumstances in which it was produced, but by an absolute standard based on the whole corpus of that art to which the particular work belongs. We do not want to hear how good "Tono-Bungay" seems by comparison with Mrs. Ward's last production. Marvellous, no doubt: so, no doubt, are Mrs. Ward's intellectual gifts by comparison with those of a walrus. But we want to have Mrs. Ward judged as a specimen of Humanity and "Tono-Bungay" as a specimen of Literature. It must be tried by the standards we try "Tristram Shandy" and "La Princesse de ClÈves" by. How, then, does it stand? With "Liaisons Dangereuses"? Hardly. Well, is it of the class of "Evelina" or of "Adolphe," or of "Consuelo" even? Mr. Bennett can be as sharp as a special constable with Thackeray: is it as good as "Pendennis"? And, unless it be infinitely better, what sense is there in despising Thackeray and extolling Mr. Wells? Pray, Mr. Bennett, how good is this book? Let us see; I think I have a note on the subject: "his scientific romances" are "on the plane of epic poetry" and "in 'Tono-Bungay' he has achieved the same feat, magnified by ten—or a hundred"; "there are passages toward the close of the book which may fitly be compared with the lyrical freedoms of no matter what epic, and which display an unsurpassable dexterity of hand." And now what are we to say of "Manon Lescaut"? That it is a million times better than Milton and knocks spots off Homer? But all this though distressing is not conclusive; it proves provinciality but it proves nothing worse. Mr. Bennett may really have been thinking all the time of "Robert Elsmere" and "The Epic of Hades." About another of his favourites, however, he is more precise: "I re-read 'A Man of Property,'" he says, "immediately after re-reading Dostoievsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and immediately before re-reading BjÖrnson's 'Arne.' It ranks well with these European masterpieces." I repeat that in one respect I am a better critic than Mr. Bennett.

This question of criticism fascinates me. It interests Mr. Bennett, too, and he has written several competent and surprisingly confident articles on the subject. I could almost wish to discuss one of them with him. I would help him to understand Coleridge and tell him about Dryden's essays and Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," and I would assure him, too, it was not I who wrote that unfortunate review of Conrad that gets such an exemplary drubbing at his hands for its self-complacent imbecility. He ought to know that, or he will think that I speak out of malice. He says that England has need of a literary critic. I agree. And I agree that this critic must not be of that professorial breed with which he deals so faithfully, not one who will date you every line in Shakespeare on internal evidence and then obligingly pronounce Sir Arthur Conan Doyle our greatest living writer. He will need the intelligence, the first-hand views, the open mind, the genuine taste for books, the respect for art and irreverence for persons of Mr. Bennett himself; and, as I have hinted, he will need one or two qualities for which Mr. Bennett is not so well off. He must be a resolute critic of literature and not an authority on current reputations; he must have enough natural taste to recognize a work of art in odd company, new clothes, or fancy dress; he must be the sort of person who would have seen at a glance that Kipling or Paul Bourget was not the real thing; he must be a scholar and a man of the intellectual world: and he must be as incapable of calling Mr. George Moore "a great artist" or speaking of "a first-rate beautiful thing" by that gentleman as Mr. Bennett is of eating peas with his knife.

The critic of our dreams—Mr. Bennett's and mine—has yet to be found. You will not imagine, surely, that I am putting myself forward as a candidate? Here you will find very few of the virtues and some, I suspect, of the critical vices to which I have alluded in this letter. But you need not fear, my dear Whitworth, that I am now going to tax your good nature by an elaborate defence of these essentially insignificant papers. They are an odd lot, and I think there are but two—the two last—that I am not a little ashamed of reprinting. Clearly, were I now to write on the same themes I should have something very different to say and should say it differently. Honestly, I believe these things are worth reading; I can say no more for them and I shall hold him generous who says as much. But the pleasure I shall derive from seeing them printed and off my hands will be as great almost as that which I felt when, four years ago, you, or your firm rather, did me the honour of publishing a book to which I attached, and continue to attach, a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far, that is, as the European situation permits.

C. B.

February 1918.