The fault of the most modern writers--and especially of the novelists--is not that they are too modern, but that they are too traditional. It is true, they are not traditional in the historical manner of G. K. Chesterton, who wishes to destroy one tradition--the modern tradition--in order to get back to another--the mediæval. To Mr. Chesterton tradition is a matter of selection; the dead tradition seems to him nobler than the living; and, deliberately, therefore, he would return to it. The new writers, however, follow a tradition also, though a much narrower one; they, too, believe in the past, but only, alas, in the immediate past; they are slaves to the generation which preceded theirs. In short, that which is disgusting in them is their inability to rise high enough to _see_ their little decade or two, and to challenge it, if they cannot from the standpoint of a nobler future, then, at least, from that of the noblest past. But how weak must a generation be which is not strong enough to challenge and supersede Arnold Bennett, for instance. 18 _The Modern Reader_ What is it that the modern reader demands from those who write for him? To be challenged, and again to be challenged, and evermore to be challenged--but on no account to be asked to accept a challenge, on no account to be expected to take sides! A seat at the tournament is all that he asks, where he may watch the most sincere and intrepid spirits of his time waging their desperate battle and spilling their life blood upon the sand. How he loves them when, with high gesture, they fling down their gauntlets and utter their blasphemies! His heart then exults within him; but, why? Simply because he is a connoisseur; simply because he _collects_ gauntlets! 19 _The Public_ Of the modern writers who are in earnest, Mr. Chesterton has had the most ironical fate: he has been read by the people who will never agree with him. To the average man for whom he writes he is an intellectual made doubly inaccessible by his orthodoxy and his paradoxy. It is the advanced, his _bête noire,_ who read him, admire him, and--disagree with him. 20 _Reader and Writer_