or a training camp, from the sons of everybody who, let us say, pays income tax without deductions.  Let us mix with these a big proportion—­a proportion we may increase steadily—­of keen scholarship men from the elementary schools.  Such a braced-up class as we should create in this way would give us the realities of military power, which are enterprise, knowledge, and invention; and at the same time it would add to and not subtract from the economic wealth of the community Make men; that is the only sane, permanent preparation for war.  So we should develop a strength and create a tradition that would not rust nor grow old-fashioned in all the years to come.

THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL

Circumstances have made me think a good deal at different times about the business of writing novels, and what it means, and is, and may be; and I was a professional critic of novels long before I wrote them.  I have been writing novels, or writing about novels, for the last twenty years.  It seems only yesterday that I wrote a review—­the first long and appreciative review he had—­of Mr. Joseph Conrad’s “Almayer’s Folly” in the Saturday Review.  When a man has focussed so much of his life upon the novel, it is not reasonable to expect him to take too modest or apologetic a view of it.  I consider the novel an important and necessary thing indeed in that complicated system of uneasy adjustments and readjustments which is modern civilisation I make very high and wide claims for it.  In many directions I do not think we can get along without it.

Now this, I know, is not the usually received opinion.  There is, I am aware, the theory that the novel is wholly and solely a means of relaxation.  In spite of manifest facts, that was the dominant view of the great period that we now in our retrospective way speak of as the Victorian, and it still survives to this day.  It is the man’s theory of the novel rather than the woman’s.  One may call it the Weary Giant theory.  The reader is represented as a man, burthened, toiling, worn.  He has been in his office from ten to four, with perhaps only two hours’ interval at his club for lunch; or he has been playing golf; or he has been waiting about and voting in the House; or he has been fishing; or he has been disputing a point of law; or writing a sermon; or doing one of a thousand other of the grave important things which constitute the substance of a prosperous man’s life.  Now at last comes the little precious interval of leisure, and the Weary Giant takes up a book.  Perhaps he is vexed:  he may have been bunkered, his line may have been entangled in the trees, his favourite investment may have slumped, or the judge have had indigestion and been extremely rude to him.  He wants to forget the troublesome realities of life.  He wants to be taken out of himself, to be cheered, consoled, amused—­above all, amused.  He doesn’t want ideas, he doesn’t want facts; above all,