This novel, though it is complete in itself, deals with the same characters as "Abington Abbey." Its publication gives me the opportunity of replying to some criticisms of that novel, which would apply equally to this one.

The criticisms to which I refer have to do, not with faults of authorship, to which it would not be becoming to reply, but with matters for which an apology, or at least an explanation, may be offered.

The first has been that in such times as these a novel dealing with minor currents of life as they existed before the war is something of an anachronism. Perhaps it is. In the fourth year of the war, life as it is depicted in these two novels seems already far away. But what is a novelist of manners to do, granted the assumption—admittedly debateable—that he is to go on writing novels at all? He must either write about the war, in one or other of its far-reaching effects upon life, or else he must leave it alone altogether. At least, those are the only alternatives that I have felt to be open to me; and, after having written one novel with the war as its deliberate climax, I have chosen the latter. When the war is over, it will be possible to take its adjustments into account as affecting everyday life, but while it is going on I do not think it is possible. It looms too big. Minor affairs would have their values in contrast with it, and truth would suffer.

If further justification were necessary, I think I could find it in the relief it brings from the heavy weight of the war to turn one's mind to those happy days in which life presented problems of less appalling significance than now, and to gain the comforting assurance that those days will come again. This relief I know to be felt by readers as well as by writers of fiction.

The second criticism upon which I should like to have my say is that the life I have depicted in those of my novels whose scenes are laid in the English country has been for some time a thing of the past, and after the war may be expected to disappear altogether. My American critics, kind as most of them are, often seem to accuse me of presenting an idyllic picture of a state of things which is based upon rotten foundations, and either of leaving out of account or of deliberately shutting my eyes to the rottenness.

I should not accept either charge. If it were worth anybody's while to read through those novels of mine in which the economic conditions of English landholding are touched upon, I think he would find in the first place that I have nowhere defended whatever abuses may still attach to the system, but have frequently satirised them; and in the second place that economic questions play but a small part in my fictions.

I think that if I had left such questions alone altogether there would be no criticism to meet. I could point to a dozen novelists who write about the same sort of people, living in the same surroundings, as I do, against whom it would not be brought, because they take the conditions for granted, and their readers take them for granted. If I touch upon such questions here and there it is because they interest me as factors in the lives of my characters; but they are not the factors which I have chosen as the main thesis of my novels, except in one instance. In "The Old Order Changeth" I did seek to reflect the renewal that is always going on in English landowning, and always has gone on since the beginning,—where the new men come in to dispossess the old; and the social disturbance that takes place at each such upheaval, before the new become absorbed in their turn into the old.

That is how I see it. Whatever changes may have come and may be coming in the economic conditions of landholding, and of agricultural labour, the life of the country house, large or small, goes on much the same as ever, and will go on. Where it can no longer be supported by the land, it is supported by money made elsewhere. English people like the flavour of country life, and it is very seldom that a man who has made his fortune in business does not eventually buy or rent a country house. Many of the big estates in the United Kingdom have been acquired of late years by rich Americans, who buy them, I suppose, not as an investment in property, but because they also are attracted by the flavour of English country life. Country houses, from the great house such as is represented here by Abington Abbey down to the little house such as Stone Cottage, are scattered all over England, and I should say that in nine cases out of ten, taking large and small together, the people who inhabit them have no concern with the land, in the way of drawing any part of their income from it, or of dealing with it as a productive agency. They have not come "back to the land" in any essential sense; they have only come back to the country. I believe that no economic changes that may affect those who live by the land, whether as employers or labourers, will much affect the social life of English country houses.

As far as my novels are concerned, it is simply a question of placing the sort of people whom I know best in the surroundings of which I like to write. Where my characters are in direct contact with the business of the land, or are affected by it, I do not shirk reference to it, as far as it seems to bear upon the main purpose of my story. But I have not set out to present an all-round picture of the conditions of country life in any of the fictional districts I have chosen as the scene of my novels. The great majority of the inhabitants of any countryside are the people who work on the land and live by it, and these I have left out almost entirely; not because I do not recognise their actual importance, but because in the social scene of my stories they would not appear, or only in a very minor degree. It may be an unsatisfactory state of things which divides people off in that way, into social strata, but it undoubtedly exists, and it is not the business of a novelist to justify the conditions he finds, but to reflect them; unless, of course, he sets out to make a discussion of those conditions the basis of his story.

As for my family of Graftons, who are real and dear to me, I have pictured them in the sunny days of peace. But in my vision, at least, the shadow of the war lies over them, as it does in retrospect over all immediately pre-war fictional characters. Dick Mansergh and Maurice Bradby would have been fighting since the beginning; Young George and his friend Jimmy would have been caught up in it by this time. In the slaughter of bright youth that is going on, it would hardly be expected that not one out of the four would be killed or wounded. George Grafton would be "doing something," with the men of his generation, and would hardly be able to regard life now as going so easily for him as to make of it a spiritual danger. The girls must have known sorrow and a much changed outlook, unless they have been more fortunate than most.

Yes, these are stories of the past, as much as if they had been written about people living forty or fifty years ago instead of four or five. But the shadow will pass away, and life will emerge again into the sunshine. I have looked forward, in writing them, as much as I have looked back.

Archibald Marshall.
March, 1918.