ing writer like Mr. Compton Mackenzie gave
us some years ago _Sinister Street_, a novel containing thousands of
sentences that only seemed to be there because he had not thought it worth
his while to leave them out, and thousands of others that seemed to be
mere hurried attempts to express realities upon which he was unable to
spend more time. Here is a writer who began literature with a sense of
words, and who is declining into a mere sense of wordiness. It is simply
another instance of the ridiculous rush of writing that is going on all
about us--a rush to satisfy a public which demands quantity rather than
quality in its books. I do not say that Mr. Mackenzie consciously wrote
down to the public, but the atmosphere obviously affected him. Otherwise
he would hardly have let his book go out into the world till he had
rewritten it--till he had separated his necessary from his unnecessary
sentences and given his conversations the tones of reality.

There is no need, however, for criticism to lash out indiscriminately at
all hurried writing. There are a multitude of books turned out every year
which make no claim to be literature--the "thrillers," for example, of Mr.
Phillips Oppenheim and of that capable firm of feuilletonists, Coralie
Stanton and Heath Hosken. I do not think literature stands to gain
anything, even though all the critics in Europe were suddenly to assail
this kind of writing. It is a frankly commercial affair, and we have no
more right to demand style from those who live by it than from the authors
of the weather reports in the newspapers. Often, one notices, when the
golden youth, fresh from college and the reading of Shelley and Anatole
France, commences literary critic, he begins damning the sensational
novelists as though it were their business to write like Jane Austen. This
is a mere waste of literary standards, which need only be applied to what
pretends to be literature. That is why one is often impelled to attack
really excellent writers, like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch or Mr. Galsworthy,
as one would never dream of attacking, say, Mr. William Le Queux. To
attack Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is, indeed, a form of appreciation, for
the only just criticism that can be levelled against him is that his later
work does not seem to be written with that singleness of imagination and
that deliberate rightness of phrase which made _Noughts and Crosses_ and
_The Ship of Stars_ books to be kept beyond the end of