workers I have had quite involuntary admirations. It isn't merely that I
don't so clearly see how they are doing it, though that may certainly be
a help; it is far more a matter of taste. As a writer I belong to one
school and as a reader to another--as a man may like to make optical
instruments and collect old china. Swift, Sterne, Jane Austen, Thackeray
and the Dickens of _Bleak House_ were the idols of my youthful
imitation, but the contemporaries of my early praises were Joseph
Conrad, W.H. Hudson, and Stephen Crane, all utterly remote from that
English tradition. With such recent admirations of mine as James Joyce,
Mr. Swinnerton, Rebecca West, the earlier works of Mary Austen or Thomas
Burke, I have as little kindred as a tunny has with a cuttlefish. We
move in the same medium and that is about all we have in common.

This much may sound egotistical, and the impatient reader may ask when I
am coming to Mr. Swinnerton, to which the only possible answer is that I
am coming to Mr. Swinnerton as fast as I can and that all this leads as
straightly as possible to a definition of Mr. Swinnerton's position. The
science of criticism is still crude in its classification, there are a
multitude of different things being done that are all lumped together
heavily as novels, they are novels as distinguished from romances, so
long as they are dealing with something understood to be real. All that
they have in common beyond that is that they agree in exhibiting a sort
of story continuum. But some of us are trying to use that story
continuum to present ideas in action, others to produce powerful
excitements of this sort or that, as Burke and Mary Austen do, while
others again concentrate upon the giving of life as it is, seen only
more intensely. Personally I have no use at all for life as it is,
except as raw material. It bores me to look at things unless there is
also the idea of doing something with them. I should find a holiday,
doing nothing amidst beautiful scenery, not a holiday, but a torture.