themselves. They are not life-they are literature, only bad literature, for they represent the abstraction and isolation of one aspect of the complex we call life. Or rather they are science, and rather bad science— the kind of thing that psychological laboratories produce, and have the decency not to label art. You must have somewhere drama and beauty, and that stuff has never a spark of it. It is like dining off a bran-mash.

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But I go a great deal further. In one sense the field of fiction is as wide as a world, but in practice a good many provinces may be ruled out. The merely pathological, for instance. For true drama, we must have action, striving, and not only suffering. The final result should be beauty, and that means some kind of triumph, not merely drab acquiescence. That is why most of the Russians, who are now the fashion, seem to me to be eternally in the second class. You will find it all in Aristotle."

Septimus looked round the shelves for a copy of the 'Poetics,' and not finding one, seized upon a volume of Matthew Arnold.

"Here," he cried, "is the same thing in other words," and he read :

"What are the situations from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life,

they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry is painful also." "

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He laid down the book. That is God's truth. It is from Arnold's 1853 Preface, and it is as true of the novel as of poetry. Drab, dismal pathology is not true to life-if any man had the unfeatured existence of some characters in modern fiction he would have cut his throat long ago and it is desperately untrue to art. For a writer to declare that his dinginess is art, is just as if a sculptor of a fat provincial mayor claimed to be the equal of Michelangelo because he had been faithful to his model. The mayor's statue is not true to life because, as a statue, it has no relation to what is significant in humanity.

"Then," continued Septimus, "I utterly dissent from all this twaddle about sex. If your friend says that the subconscious self is mainly concerned with sex, I reply that that is a theory for which not an atom of true scientific proof has ever been forthcoming. It is a return to medieval superstition. Anyhow I am sick of this psycho-analysis chatter. What is new in it is mostly rubbish, and what is true is as old as the hills. The real reason why sex plays such a part in fiction is commercial-it is the circulating libraries, where most of the customers are women. The modern novelist who specializes in sex is not being bold and original; he is following a bad commercial convention of his craft which arose because the old novel had to be made to appeal to idle and sentimental ladies. It has nothing to do with art, and less with life."

I observed that Septimus was a crusted bachelor,

and therefore scarcely entitled to speak on such high matters. At that he exploded.

?

"All the more reason why I should speak. I have no bias, but I have seen a good deal of life and read a good deal of literature. Does anyone seriously pretend that the love of a man and woman is the only thing of first-class importance? What about the relations of man and woman to their God, to their fellows, to their country? Some donkeys talk as if the only real tragedy was a disastrous love affair. Bosh! There's as much tragic material in the relations of parents and children, or the relations of friendship, or some great impersonal cause like statesmanship or war. The only love tragedy in the 'Iliad' is a story of Anteia and Bellerophon, and it occupies exactly six lines out of fifteen thousand. You remember Dr. Johnson on one of Pope's poems He said that poetry is not often worse employed than in dignifying the amorous fury of a raving girl.' I agree-raving girl or raving hobbledehoy. Do you realize how few of the very greatest of Shakespeare's plays deal with love in the ordinary sense? Dr. Johnson said the reason was that 'love has no great influence on the sum of life.' I think that perhaps is to go too far, but love is only one among the major influences, and of late years it has been ridiculously over-rated. Why does your young friend, while clamouring for the extension of the province of the novel, want in practice to confine it to that dreary farm-yard? The thing is Oriental, a bad derivation. from the East, and I fancy that the root of the trouble is that we have too many bright young Hebrews, male and female, trying their hand at the novel to-day."

I was rather shocked at this way of talking, and, as I had to leave to catch my train, I was forced to cut short the flow of Septimus's eloquence. But I remember his last words: "It is foolish to worry about revolt in anything-literature or politics. We human beings are what many generations have made us, and even if we want to we cannot divest ourselves of the past and march naked into a new world. It is quite right that youth should be hostile to tradition and hot for new things, but if a fellow has any real stuff in him, he will come to see that the only freedom is that which comes from the willing and reasoned acceptance of discipline, and the only true originality that which springs from the re-birth of historic tradition in a man's soul."

Then, just as I was leaving, he said a thing which gave me ground for reflection on my journey home. "There is nothing wrong with the practice of youth," he said. "It has got to experiment and splash about till it finds itself, and the more vigorously it splashes, the better I like it. The trouble only begins when it embarks on theories. These are bound to be crude and partial. Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait. Power and energy can be attributes of youth, not wisdom. Its deeds are right, but its creeds are usually wrong, and its literary criticism is apt to be damned nonsense." He shouted something after me as I left the room, which I think was a quotation from Aristotle.

I have tried to make clear to you the points of view of my two estimable friends. On thinking over their words, I began to suspect that the whole dispute might be largely a bogus one. The full truth might

lie in neither case, and both in their way might be right. Why should there not be two attitudes, the one proper for youth and the creative artist, and the other for maturity, the scholar and the critic?

I am inclined to think myself that if a man has not been a revolutionary at some time in his life he will never come to much. A certain arrogance and revolt at one stage are proof of a vigorous personality, which has first to assert itself against the world before it can accept and remodel the world so as to make it its own. At that stage a man should be very sensitive to the atmosphere of his time, and should rate it extravagantly high, simply because it is his own. It is the medium in which he must live and work, and if he shuts himself off from it he will become a fossil. If he is a writer or painter or musician, he ought to think that he lives in a new dawn of the world, for that will give him courage and confidence. It is right that he should over-rate the work of his own day, because it speaks to him with a living and intimate voice. When Hobbes said that Gondibert' was better than the 'Odyssey,' he did not really mean that Davenant was greater than Homer, but that 'Gondibert' had an appeal to him and his contemporaries, something new and hopeful, which he did not find in the Greek. When an undergraduate tells me that some writer whose books seem to me like the howling of a demented wolf is a greater novelist than Meredith, he means-unless he is merely repeating like a parrot somebody else's opinion that this writer is trying to do with the novel something which nobody has quite tried before, and in which he (the undergraduate) is deeply