me.' Later on, the bourgeoisie will tread
in them.

Who is the Man?

I

And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we
rot and rot. A gloomy saying, but one which applies to men as well as to
empires, and to none, perhaps, more than to those men who stand in the
vanguard of literature. Of very few writers, save those who were so
fortunate as to be carried away by death in the plenitude of their
powers (unless, like Mr Thomas Hardy, they drew back from the battle of
letters) can it be said that the works of their later years were equal
to those of their maturity. The great man has his heir in the world, one
who impatiently waits for his shoes and is assured that he will fill
them. It is well so, for shoes must be filled, and it is good to know
the claimants.

Who are these men? Is it possible already to designate them? To mark out
the Hardy or the Meredith of to-morrow? The Bennett, the Wells, or the
Galsworthy? It is difficult. I shall not be surprised if some quarrel
with these names, cavil at the selection and challenge a greatness which
they look upon as transient. Those critics may be right. I do not, in
this article, attempt a valuation of those whom I will call the literary
novelists, that is to say, the men who have 'somehow,' and owing to
hardly ascertained causes, won their way into the front rank of modern
English letters. It may be urged that these are not our big men, and
that the brazen blaring of popular trumpets has drowned the blithe
piping of tenderer songsters. But, if we view facts sanely, we must all
agree that there are in England five men, of whom one is a foreigner,
who hold without challenge the premier position among novelists: Mr
Arnold Bennett, Mr Joseph Conrad, Mr John Galsworthy, Mr Thomas Hardy,
and Mr H. G. Wells. Theirs is a special position: there is not one of
them, probably, whose sales would create envy in the bosom of Mr Harold
Bell Wright or of Mrs Barclay; nor are they of the super-hyper class
whose works are issued in wisely limited editions and printed in
over-beautiful type. They are, in a very rough way, the men of their
time and, a very little, the men of all time. Whatever be their
greatness or their littleness, they are the men who will, for the
University Extension Lecturer of 1950, represent the English novel in a
given period; they are not the most literary of their contemporaries;
they have not more ideas than some of their contempo