ABSTRACT
Modern English criticism, allowing as it does that Poetry and Essay and Drama are fit subjects for its most serious attention, nevertheless denies the novel similar privileges : the modem novel, it gives us to understand, is, when popular, bad, and when unpopular pretentious, and behind this general principle there lurks a conviction that the art of selection is in modern fiction an impossible thing and that, at any rate, even when a selection is made, nobody cares. The endeavour in England to notice every novel that is published must lead to certain disaster, and the fact that the novel about which most people wish to read notices is, as a rule, the novel about which there is the least, critically, to be said, adds to the difficulties. Finally, it is beyond question true that the general level of English fiction is, at the present moment, high, and this very quantity of adequate work adds to the confusion of the critic’s duties.
