anticipation. For my part, I am determined only to decide which is not the
novel of the season. There are several novels which are not the novel of
the season. Perhaps the chief of them is Mr. E.C. Booth's "The Cliff End,"
which counts among sundry successes to the score of Mr. Grant Richards.
Everything has been done for it that reviewing can do, and it has sold,
and it is an ingenious and giggling work, but not the novel of the season.

The reviews of "The Cliff End," almost unanimously laudatory, show in a
bright light our national indifference to composition in art. Some
reviewers, while stating that the story itself was a poor one, insisted
that Mr. Booth is a born and accomplished story-teller. Story-tellers
born and accomplished do not tell poor stories. A poor story is the work
of a poor story-teller. And the story of "The Cliff End" is merely absurd.
It is worse, if possible, than the story of Mr. Maxwell's "Vivien," which
reviewers accepted. It would appear that with certain novels the story
doesn't matter! I really believe that composition, the foundation of all
arts, including the art of fiction, is utterly unconsidered in England. Or
if it is considered, it is painfully misunderstood. I remember how the
panjandrums condescendingly pointed out the bad construction of Mr. Joseph
Conrad's "Lord Jim," one of the most noble examples of fine composition in
modern literature, and but slightly disfigured by a detail of clumsy
machinery. In "The Cliff End" there is simply no composition that is not
clumsy and conventional. All that can be said of it is that you can't read
a page, up to about page 200, without grinning. (Unhappily Mr. Booth
overestimated his stock of grins, which ran out untimely.) The true art of
fiction, however, is not chiefly connected with grinning, or with weeping.
It consists, first and mainly, in a beautiful general composition. But in
Anglo-Saxon countries any writer who can induce both a grin and a tear on
the same page, no matter how insolent his contempt for composition, is
sure of that immortality which contemporaries can award.