SOURCE: “Chapter Nine Best Sellers: Hall Caine and Others,” in Old Gods Falling, The Macmillan Company, 1939, pp. 290-328.

In the following excerpt, Elwin derides Caine's work for its “morbid gloom, sentimentality, and sanctimony.”

Symons's definition of symbolism, “a representation which does not aim at being a reproduction,” could easily be distorted into Haggard's working axiom that impossibility does not matter, “provided it is made to appear possible.” George Moore's pro-Zola campaign in the ’eighties, and the trend of Hardy's work, suggested an imminent adoption of realism in fiction, but the banning of Zola placed realism definitely beyond the pale of respectability, and while the success of Esther Waters in 1894 raised its stock, the market fell again with the reception of Jude the Obscure in 1896. In the ’nineties, realistic fiction was written only by young and new writers, by Hubert Crackanthorpe in his brilliant and important books of short...