Six years ago Dr. Cronin came in like a lion, to the fanfare of a critical acclaim that bracketed his name with those of Ibsen, Hardy and Charlotte Brontë. British fiction, so thin and nervous since the war, seemed a little more human. Here, it was generally felt, was a doctor who had deserted the surgery because of a genuine literary compulsion, a man whose first book was a solid and resounding tragedy, a writer who seemed able to plow his way through the sickliness and the corruption of trivial realism. Dr. Cronin wrote competently; it was obvious that he wrote passionately; and whatever one thought of his claim to greatness, there was a general, pleased feeling that some one solid had arrived.

In those six years the resemblance to Ibsen, Hardy and Charlotte Brontë has become increasingly invisible. Dr. Cronin's big, square novels, published with such becoming...