which so often nowadays runs to four or five hundred pages in a novel.  It was amazing to find with what airiness a promising writer like Mr. Compton Mackenzie gave us some years ago Sinister Street, a novel containing thousands of sentences that only seemed to be there because he had not thought it worth his while to leave them out, and thousands of others that seemed to be mere hurried attempts to express realities upon which he was unable to spend more time.  Here is a writer who began literature with a sense of words, and who is declining into a mere sense of wordiness.  It is simply another instance of the ridiculous rush of writing that is going on all about us—­a rush to satisfy a public which demands quantity rather than quality in its books.  I do not say that Mr. Mackenzie consciously wrote down to the public, but the atmosphere obviously affected him.  Otherwise he would hardly have let his book go out into the world till he had rewritten it—­till he had separated his necessary from his unnecessary sentences and given his conversations the tones of reality.

There is no need, however, for criticism to lash out indiscriminately at all hurried writing.  There are a multitude of books turned out every year which make no claim to be literature—­the “thrillers,” for example, of Mr. Phillips Oppenheim and of that capable firm of feuilletonists, Coralie Stanton and Heath Hosken.  I do not think literature stands to gain anything, even though all the critics in Europe were suddenly to assail this kind of writing.  It is a frankly commercial affair, and we have no more right to demand style from those who live by it than from the authors of the weather reports in the newspapers.  Often, one notices, when the golden youth, fresh from college and the reading of Shelley and Anatole France, commences literary critic, he begins damning the sensational novelists as though it were their business to write like Jane Austen.  This is a mere waste of literary standards, which need only be applied to what pretends to be literature.  That is why one is often impelled to attack really excellent writers, like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch or Mr. Galsworthy, as one would never dream of attacking, say, Mr. William Le Queux.  To attack Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is, indeed, a form of appreciation, for the only just criticism that can be levelled against him is that his later work does not seem to be written with that singleness of imagination and that deliberate rightness of phrase which made Noughts and Crosses and The Ship of Stars books to be kept beyond the end of the year.  If one attacks Mr. Galsworthy, again, it is usually because one admires his best work so whole-heartedly that one is not willing to accept from him anything but the best.  One cannot, however, be content to see the author of The Man of Property dropping the platitudes and the false fancifulness of The Inn of Tranquillity.  It is the false pretences in literature which criticism