Mr. Marshall is a twentieth century novelist, because he is happily yet alive, and because he writes of twentieth century scenes and characters; but he is apart from the main currents of twentieth century fiction, standing indeed in the midst of the stream like a commemorative pillar to Victorian art. He has never written historical romance, which dominated the novel at the beginning of our century; he has never written the "life" novel—beginning with the hero's birth and travelling with plotless chronology, the type most in favour since the year 1906; he has never written a treatise and called it a novel, as so many of his contemporaries have done. Every one of his novels, except the two unfortunate burlesques, is a good story, with a good plot and living characters; and he has chosen to write about well-bred people, because those are the people he knows best.  
It is also well to remember, that although his best novels are parochial, he himself is a[52] citizen of the world. He has seen the North Cape, he has lived in the Australian bush, in various European cities, and has traveled extensively in America. One reason why he can describe English country life so clearly is because he sees it in the proper perspective. He is at home in any community on earth.
 
I call him a realistic novelist, because his realism is of the highest and most convincing kind—it constantly reminds us of reality. I cannot see why a well-constructed story, that deals mainly with attractive men and women, and ends on a note of robust cheerfulness, should have any less right to the adjective "realistic" than an ill-arranged transcript of the existence of creatures living amongst poverty, filth, and crime. And so far as Mr. Marshall's Victorian reticence on questions of sex is concerned, this strengthens his right to the title Realist. As Henry James said, the moment you insist that animalism must have its place in works of art, there almost always seems to be no place for anything else. If a novelist is to represent real life, he must make subordinate and incidental what in some novels dominates every page. If a writer is to describe events as they really happen, to[53] portray men and women as they really are, to create living characters that can be recognized in modern society, he ought to emphasize in his art what life itself emphasizes—the difference between man and the lower animals. The curious thing is that in many so-called realistic novels it is impossible to distinguish between human beings and the beasts of the field; the well-understood likeness is stressed so heavily that not only the individual, but even the type is lost. One can hardly call so total an absence of discrimination true art. Even the most elementary man or woman is less elementary than a beast; and is it not true that the greater the complexity, the greater the skill required to report it truly?
 
And here is a strange thing. It is only in stories of human beings that our would-be realists insist that animalism should be most frankly and most minutely portrayed. When we come to dog-stories—of which there are many—the element of sex is as a rule wholly omitted. Yet surely this is more salient in the life of a dog than in the life of a man.
 
Archibald Marshall is............