NO IMMORTAL NOVELISTS

Evening Star, Issue 21636, 3 February 1934, Page 22

NO IMMORTAL NOVELISTS

“How long will the great writers last, and are there any great writers to-day, or were there ever? Have the immortals always been really very mortal, their works inadequately buried on the bookshelf? How much of Meredith is readable, how much of Dickens, and will anybody fifty years hence know the initials of H. G. Wells, or that Bennett was' called Arnold, or that Shaw lost no opportunity of insulting the English ? Questions such as these are always arising where two or three booklovers are gathered together,” writes Mr Cecil Roberts, in the book supplement of the ‘ Sphere.’ “ They arose the other day at a literary gathering, where Sir John Squire upset quite a number of persons by suggesting . that few living writers would go on living after they were dead, to put it in an Irish way. Then up pops Mr Hugh Walpole, flatly refusing to believe that Kensal Rise Cemetery or Golder’s Green Crematorium sees the last appearance of the great writer. Dickens is widely read, Thackeray is still loved, even Galsworthy can call up his legions. Further, "Mr Walpole labels the vacant plinths in the Hall of Fame with' a number of names of living authors. They will not die, he says boldly.” “ I am afraid I agree with Sir John Squire,” continues Mr Roberts, who is a novelist, as well as a critic. “ Immortality has gone out of fashion. Genius is such a commonplace thing today that there is not room for all the masterpieces. 1 I couldn’t give Dickens away,’ said a bookseller to me the other dav. The Bishop of London told me he" had been reading Thackeray’s ‘ Esmond,’ and found it very heavy going. It was a shock for him to find that Thackeray did not wear well. The machinery creaked, and language had worn threadbare. There is nothing really to lament in this. We have too long been intimidated by the libraries we do not use, by those rows of the mustv mighty whose backs we now strip for dummy doors/ As if conscious of their short lives, modern books are more sprightly, they are written for the crowded hour.”