y upon the disagreeable facts of life and catalogue
them with gluttonous care, which group is the only one that counts.
Now we are strong for disagreeable facts. We know a great many. But
somehow we cannot shake ourself loose from the instinctive
conviction that imagination is the without-which-nothing of the art
of fiction. Miss Stella Benson is one who is not unobservant of
disagreeables, but when she writes she can convey her satire in
flashing, fantastic absurdity, in a heavenly chiding so delicate and
subtle that the victim hardly knows he is being chidden. The
photographic facsimile of life always seems to us the lesser art,
because it is so plainly the easier course.

We fear we are not acute enough to explain just why it is that Mr.
Lewis's salute to Mrs. Scott bothers us so. But it does bother us a
good deal. We have nourished ourself, in the main, upon the work of
two modern writers: Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad; we
like to apply as a test such theories as we have been able to glean
from those writers. Faulty and erring as we are, we always rise from
Mr. Conrad's books purged and, for the moment, strengthened.
Apparent in him are that manly and honourable virtue, that strict
saline truth and scrupulous regard for life, that liberation from
cant, which seem to be inbred in those who have suffered the
exacting discipline of the hostile sea. Certainly Conrad cannot be
called a writer who has neglected the tragic side of things. Yet in
his "Notes on Life and Letters," we find this:

What one feels so hopelessly barren in declared pessimism is
just its arrogance. It seems as if the discovery made by many
men at various times that there is much evil in the world were
a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern
writers. That frame of mind is not the proper one in which to
approach seriously the art of fiction.... To be hopeful in an
artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is
good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of
its being made so.... I would ask that in his dealings with
mankind he [the writer] should be capable of giving a tender
recognition to their obscure virtues. I would not have him
impatient with their small failings and scornful of their
errors.

We fear that our mild protest is rather mixed and muddled. But what
we darkly feel is this: that no author "belongs," or "unders