This instantly raises the question of Victorianism, to some a stumbling-block, to some foolishness. For my part, if I did not believe that the best Victorian fiction was superior to contemporary work, I should not be so hearty an admirer of Archibald Marshall. Indeed the best Victorian novels surpass our best twentieth century novels in the one respect where we chiefly plume ourselves on our claim to attention--I mean in the matter of sincerity. We talk about sincerity all the time, but we protest too much; the essence of sincerity is present perhaps more often in art, as it is in life, where its profession is least urgent. Henry James, in the fragment of autobiography called _The Middle Years_, wisely though oracularly remarked, "Phenomena may be interesting, thank goodness, without being phenomena of elegant expression or of any other form of restless smartness, and when once type is strong, when once it plays up from deep sources, every show of its sincerity delivers us a message and we hang, to real suspense, on its continuance of energy, on its again and yet again consistently acquitting itself. So it keeps in tune, and, as the French adage says, _c'est le ton qui fait la chanson_. The mid-Victorian London was sincere--that was a vast virtue and a vast appeal; the contemporary is sceptical, and most so when most plausible." On a summer day in 1914, I had the pleasure of a ten-mile drive over the hills with one of the wisest old men in America--Andrew D. White. I remember his saying that one of the most fortunate things that could happen to America would be a general ambition on the part of the more educated classes to look forward as to a goal in life to making a permanent home in the country. He said that in America men who make a little money move into the city as soon as possible; whereas in England, whenever a man makes a competence in the city he usually establishes a home in the country. No one can read the novels of Mr. Marshall without feeling that his books are so to speak based on this ideal; he repeatedly insists that life in the country is the true life for thoughtful men and women, and that the most delectable season for the solid enjoyment of it is the winter. Nay, he takes the position--a position also occupied by one of our ablest American novelists, Dorothy Canfield--that the most favourable locality for studying human nature is the small country village. He says, "Life in such a community as is depicted in _Exton Manor_ is just as typical of English social habits as it was in Trollope's day. The tendency of those who have hitherto worked on the land to drift into the towns is not shared by the more leisured classes. Their tendency is all the other way--to forsake the towns for the country--and improved methods of communication keep them more in touch with the world than they would have been fifty years ago. But in spite of this increased dependency upon the outside