Literature and the Middle Classes.

I am sorry to be compelled to cast a slur upon the Literary profession, but observation shows me that it still contains within its ranks writers born and bred in, and moving amidst—if, without offence, one may put it bluntly—a purely middle-class environment: men and women to whom Park Lane will never be anything than the shortest route between Notting Hill and the Strand; to whom Debrett’s Peerage—gilt-edged and bound in red, a tasteful-looking volume—ever has been and ever will remain a drawing-room ornament and not a social necessity.  Now what is to become of these writers—of us, if for the moment I may be allowed to speak as representative of this rapidly-diminishing yet nevertheless still 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.