Reputations Author:Douglas Goldring Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS I. Compton Mackenzie If the ordinary circulating library subscriber were asked for the names of the three English novelists still ... more »under forty who have most definitely " arrived," ten to one he (or she) would mention Mr. Compton Mackenzie, Mr. Hugh Walpole and Mr. Gilbert Cannan. The success of this triumvirate when—their apprenticeship served —they assembled under the banner of Mr. Martin Seeker to make their respective bids for fame, was immediate, and in some ways perhaps unprecedented. For theirs was not merely a success of vulgar popularity, it was a succes cTestime as well. Novel readers who borrowed the works of these writers from their libraries felt that they were not quite as other novel readers, that they were displaying kultur. And, thanks either to their eminent social qualifications, to the skill and tact of their impresario, or to their own undoubted talents, these three pretty men very soon came to stand for the " younger generation" whenever the " older generation" wished topatronise their juniors or to pontificate about them. Even Mr. Henry James spun a stately web of words around them in The Times Literary Supplement. It was not necessary to read what he had written to feel that since he had actually examined and discussed their works they must be of astounding merit. Where the high, august ones had pronounced, it was not for the mere reviewers to do anything but echo and enlarge. Thus, like a snowball, the prestige of these three novelists increased from year to year until the disruptive influence of the War intervened to break the spell and to impose a reconsideration of every opinion, whether aesthetic or political, which we entertained before its outbreak. The War has hung up all literary careers, those of the successful as well...« less