SOURCE: “Ecclesia Anglicana,” in Double Dealer, Vol. 6, No. 36, July, 1924, pp. 171-73.

In the following essay, Wright contends that the humor in The Parson's Progress “will save it for the unimaginative people who are bored by its ecclesiasticism, and the long-faced people who are interested exclusively in the ecclesiasticism will contrive to swallow the humor.”

The thing I like most about Mr. Compton Mackenzie's latest phase as a novelist is the capacity it must contain to annoy most of his former admirers. He is an author who owed much of his original vogue to the exploitation of what was, after all, a rather shallow art on the part of a great number of rather shallow people. So long as universities and undergraduates exist, Mr. Mackenzie, in his original manner, was bound to be widely read and callowly imitated. He was the novelist of the freshman, just as Thackeray, say...