The Angel and the Author | Page 9

numerous section of the world of Art and Letters?
Formerly, provided we were masters of style, possessed imagination
and insight, understood human nature, had sympathy with and
knowledge of life, and could express ourselves with humour and
distinction, our pathway was, comparatively speaking, free from
obstacle. We drew from the middle-class life around us, passed it
through our own middle-class individuality, and presented it to a public
composed of middle-class readers.
But the middle-class public, for purposes of Art, has practically
disappeared. The social strata from which George Eliot and Dickens
drew their characters no longer interests the great B. P. Hetty Sorrell,
Little Em'ly, would be pronounced "provincial;" a Deronda or a Wilfer
Family ignored as "suburban."
I confess that personally the terms "provincial" and "suburban," as
epithets of reproach, have always puzzled me. I never met anyone more
severe on what she termed the "suburban note" in literature than a thin
lady who lived in a semi-detached villa in a by-street of Hammersmith.
Is Art merely a question of geography, and if so what is the exact limit?
Is it the four-mile cab radius from Charing Cross? Is the cheesemonger
of Tottenham Court Road of necessity a man of taste, and the Oxford
professor of necessity a Philistine? I want to understand this thing. I
once hazarded the direct question to a critical friend:

"You say a book is suburban," I put it to him, "and there is an end to
the matter. But what do you mean by suburban?"
"Well," he replied, "I mean it is the sort of book likely to appeal to the
class that inhabits the suburbs." He lived himself in Chancery Lane.
[May a man of intelligence live, say, in Surbiton?]
"But there is Jones, the editor of The Evening Gentleman," I argued;
"he lives at Surbiton. It is just twelve miles from Waterloo. He comes
up every morning by the eight-fifteen and returns again by the five-ten.
Would you say that a book is bound to be bad because it appeals to
Jones? Then again, take Tomlinson: he lives, as you are well aware, at
Forest Gate which is Epping way, and entertains you on Kakemonos
whenever you call upon him. You know what I mean, of course. I think
'Kakemono' is right. They are long things; they look like coloured
hieroglyphics printed on brown paper. He gets behind them and holds
them up above his head on the end of a stick so that you can see the
whole of them at once; and he tells you the name of the Japanese artist
who painted them in the year 1500 B.C., and what it is all about. He
shows them to you by the hour and forgets to give you dinner. There
isn't an easy chair in the house. To put it vulgarly, what is wrong with
Tomlinson from a high art point of view?
"There's a man I know who lives in Birmingham: you must have heard
of him. He is the great collector of Eighteenth Century caricatures, the
Rowlandson and Gilray school of things. I don't call them artistic
myself; they make me ill to look at them; but people who understand
Art rave about them. Why can't a man be artistic who has got a cottage
in the country?"
"You don't understand me," retorted my critical friend, a little irritably,
as I thought.
"I admit it," I returned. "It is what I am trying to do."
"Of course artistic people live in the suburbs," he admitted. "But they
are not of the suburbs."

"Though they may dwell in Wimbledon or Hornsey," I suggested, "they
sing with the Scotch bard: 'My heart is in the South-West postal district.
My heart is not here.'"
"You can put it that way if you like," he growled.
"I will, if you have no objection," I agreed. "It makes life easier for
those of us with limited incomes."
The modern novel takes care, however, to avoid all doubt upon the
subject. Its personages, one and all, reside within the half-mile square
lying between Bond Street and the Park--a neighbourhood that would
appear to be somewhat densely populated. True, a year or two ago there
appeared a fairly successful novel the heroine of which resided in
Onslow Gardens. An eminent critic observed of it that: "It fell short
only by a little way of being a serious contribution to English
literature." Consultation with the keeper of the cabman's shelter at
Hyde Park Corner suggested to me that the "little way" the critic had in
mind measures exactly eleven hundred yards. When the nobility and
gentry of the modern novel do leave London they do not go into the
provinces: to do that would be vulgar. They make straight for
"Barchester Towers," or what the Duke calls