SOURCE: "Very Much On the Spot" in New Statesman, Vol. XXXV, No. 890, May 17, 1930, pp. 180-82.

MacCarthy was one of the foremost English literary and drama critics of the twentieth century. He served for many years on the staff of the New Statesman and edited Life and Letters. A member of the Bloomsbury group, which also included Leonard and Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey among its number, MacCarthy was guided by their primary tenet that "one' sprime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience, and the pursuit of knowledge." MacCarthy brought to his work a wide range of reading, serious and sensitive judgement, an interest in the works of new writers, and high critical standards. In the following excerpt, he praises Wallace's play On the Spot.

With a little more industry Mr. Edgar Wallace might provide all the...