So are all the
Russians of the first rank; Andrieff, Gorki and their like are light
cavalry. In Sudermann, Germany has a writer of short stories of very
high calibre, but where is the German novelist to match Conrad? Clara
Viebig? Thomas Mann? Gustav Frenssen? Arthur Schnitzler? Surely not! As
for the Italians, they are either absurd tear-squeezers or more absurd
harlequins. As for the Spaniards and the Scandinavians, they would pass
for geniuses only in Suburbia. In America, setting aside an odd volume
here and there, one can discern only Dreiser--and of Dreiser's
limitations I shall discourse anon. There remains England. England has
the best second-raters in the world; nowhere else is the general level
of novel writing so high; nowhere else is there a corps of journeyman
novelists comparable to Wells, Bennett, Benson, Walpole, Beresford,
George, Galsworthy, Hichens, De Morgan, Miss Sinclair, Hewlett and
company. They have a prodigious facility; they know how to write; even
the least of them is, at all events, a more competent artisan than, say,
Dickens, or Bulwer-Lytton, or Sienkiewicz, or Zola.
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