It is inevitable that I shall be accused of exaggeration, cynicism, or prejudice:  probably all three.  Whenever one tells the truth in this island of compromise, one is sure to be charged on these counts, and to be found guilty.  But I too am of the sporting race, and forty years have taught me that telling the truth is the most dangerous and most glorious of all forms of sport.  Alpine climbing in winter is nothing to it.  I like it.  I will only add that I have been speaking of the solid bloc of the caste; I admit the existence of a broad fringe of exceptions.  And I truly sympathize with the bloc.  I do not blame the bloc.  I know that the members of the bloc are, like me, the result of evolutionary forces now spent.  My hostility to the bloc is beyond my control, an evolutionary force gathering way.  Upon my soul, I love the bloc.  But when I sit among it, clothed in correctness, and reflect that the bloc maintains me and mine in a sort of comfort, because I divert its leisure, the humour of the situation seems to me enormous.

* * * * *

[11 Feb ’09]

I continue my notes on the great, stolid, comfortable class which forms the backbone of the novel-reading public.  The best novelists do not find their material in this class.  Thomas Hardy never.  H.G.  Wells, almost never; now and then he glances at it ironically, in an episodic manner.  Hale White (Mark Rutherford), never.  Rudyard Kipling, rarely; when he touches it, the reason is usually because it happens to embrace the military caste, and the result is usually such mawkish stories as “William the Conqueror” and “The Brushwood Boy.”  J.M.  Barrie, never.  W.W.  Jacobs, never.  Murray Gilchrist, never.  Joseph Conrad, never.  Leonard Merrick, very slightly.  George Moore, in a “Drama in Muslin,” wrote a masterpiece about it twenty years ago; “Vain Fortune” is also good; but for a long time it had ceased to interest the artist in him, and his very finest work ignores it.  George Meredith was writing greatly about it thirty years ago.  Henry James, with the chill detachment of an outlander, fingers the artistic and cosmopolitan fringe of it.  In a rank lower than these we have William de Morgan and John Galsworthy.  The former does not seem to be inspired by it.  As for John Galsworthy, the quality in him which may possibly vitiate his right to be considered a major artist is precisely his fierce animosity to this class.  Major artists are seldom so cruelly hostile to anything whatever as John Galsworthy is to this class.  He does in fiction what John Sargent does in paint; and their inimical observation of their subjects will gravely prejudice both of them in the eyes of posterity.  I think I have mentioned all the novelists who have impressed themselves at once on the public and genuinely on the handful of persons whose taste is severe and sure.  There may be, there are, other novelists alive whose work will end