The novel reader, I suppose, knows no greater weariness, no sensation of more profound misgiving than that which comes over him when he realises on page 173 that the action of the story is about to land him in the year 1913. He loses interest immediately. What does it matter, he asks himself, whether Jane becomes engaged to that rascal Harry, or Arthur elopes with the designing Marjorie? August 1914 is coming, and from whatever manner of fix into which, between now and then, they may contrive to place themselves the author will have no difficulty in extricating them. The reader feels that he has been deceived. He has no use for the _deus ex machinâ_. He feels as the small boy did who flung the _Iliad_ in disgust across the room, and exclaimed: “Rotten! they never had a fair fight once. There was always a god on one side or another.” The war, in the average novel, is an effect without a cause. It is unquestionable that a great many homes were absolutely turned inside out by “the great interruption.” There is no doubt that a great many difficulties were removed by this heaven-sent intervention, even as a great many simple situations were made interminably complex. All over the world there was effect without a cause, but in the novel, which is an essentially artificial thing, a thing that one makes with one’s own hands, there can be no effect without cause. And the conscientious novelist gazes in dismay at this tear across the fabric of life. He can, of course, start his story earlier; but there can be no real conclusion to a chronicle novel that ends in 1910. The reader knows that, in four years’ time, the happy home on which the curtain has so tenderly descended will be in chaos and that the hero will have to set out again on his travels. He can hardly begin it in December 1918 with the picture of a young man walking out of his tailor’s, in a grey tweed suit. A chronicle novel can barely get started in five years. And it is equally difficult for a writer to take the war in his stride. There have been one or two attempts; but, with the exception of “The Forsyte Saga,” they have been failures. For that type of novel one wants a clear ten years on either side.