a weariness of all other pictures that are not absolutely first rate, giving them a disconcerting affinity to the tops of chocolate-boxes or to “art” photographs, I have permitted myself to suspect that supposing some writer were to come along and do in words what these men have done in paint, I might conceivably be disgusted with nearly the whole of modern fiction, and I might have to begin again.  This awkward experience will in all probability not happen to me, but it might happen to a writer younger than me.  At any rate it is a fine thought.  The average critic always calls me, both in praise and dispraise, “photographic”; and I always rebut the epithet with disdain, because in the sense meant by the average critic I am not photographic.  But supposing that in a deeper sense I were?  Supposing a young writer turned up and forced me, and some of my contemporaries—­us who fancy ourselves a bit—­to admit that we had been concerning ourselves unduly with inessentials, that we had been worrying ourselves to achieve infantile realisms?  Well, that day would be a great and a disturbing day—­for us.

1911

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

[12 Jan. ’11]

The practice of reviewing the literature of the year at the end thereof is now decaying.  Newspapers still give a masterly survey of the motor-cars of the year.  I remember the time when it was part of my duty as a serious journalist to finish at Christmas a two-thousand word article, full of discrimination as fine as Irish lace, about the fiction of the year; and other terrifying specialists were engaged to deal amply with the remaining branches of literature.  To-day, one man in one column and one day will polish off what five of us scarcely exhausted in seven columns and seven days.  I am referring to the distant past of a dozen years ago, before William de Morgan was born, and before America and Elinor Glyn had discovered each other.  Last week many newspapers dismissed the entire fiction of 1910 in a single paragraph.  The consequence is that there has been no “book of the year.”  A critic without space to spread himself hesitates to pronounce downright for a particular book.  A critic engaged in the dangerous art of creating the “book of the year” wants room to hedge, and in the newest journalism there is no room to hedge.  So the critic refrains from the act of creation.  He imitates the discretion of the sporting tipster, who names several horses as being likely to win one race.  “Among the books of the year are Blank, Blank, and Blank,” he says.  (But what he means is, “The book of the year is to be found among Blank, Blank, and Blank.”) Naturally he selects among the books whose titles come into his head with the least difficulty; that is to say, the books which he has most recently reviewed; that is to say, the books published during the autumn season.  No doubt during the spring season he has distinguished several books as being “great,” “masterly,” “unforgettable,” “genius”; but ere the fall of the leaf these works have completely escaped from his memory.  No author, and particularly no novelist who wishes to go down to posterity, should publish during the spring season; it is fatal.