My hostility to the _bloc_ is beyond my control, an evolutionary
force gathering way. Upon my soul, I love the _bloc_. But when I sit among
it, clothed in correctness, and reflect that the _bloc_ maintains me and
mine in a sort of comfort, because I divert its leisure, the humour of the
situation seems to me enormous.
* * * * *
[_11 Feb '09_]
I continue my notes on the great, stolid, comfortable class which forms
the backbone of the novel-reading public. The best novelists do not find
their material in this class. Thomas Hardy never. H.G. Wells, almost
never; now and then he glances at it ironically, in an episodic manner.
Hale White (Mark Rutherford), never. Rudyard Kipling, rarely; when he
touches it, the reason is usually because it happens to embrace the
military caste, and the result is usually such mawkish stories as "William
the Conqueror" and "The Brushwood Boy." J.M. Barrie, never. W.W. Jacobs,
never. Murray Gilchrist, never. Joseph Conrad, never. Leonard Merrick,
very slightly. George Moore, in a "Drama in Muslin," wrote a masterpiece
about it twenty years ago; "Vain Fortune" is also good; but for a long
time it had ceased to interest the artist in him, and his very finest work
ignores it.
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