The younger generation is having an immense amount of attention paid it by the novelists of today. School stories abound, foot the jolly old-fashioned school stories, with their idealist friendships, their thrilling game contests, and their appeal to the boy reader, but problem school stories, full of desperate purpose, critical, ‘contributions to the literature of the subject,’ as the commercial jacket grimly records. They afford psychological material for Freud, Jung, and their more unpleasant followers. They are not books for boys, but about boys written for the purpose of improving the education of youth.

Then there are the young-man books, not the old-fashioned type even of Father Benson—who died in 1914, and whose characters are, therefore, pre-war and out of fashion—but the newer type, full of complexes and inhibitions with enormous elaboration of unnecessary detail, due to a pelmanistic capacity for observation, searching out and remembering the irrelevant. We notice in them the sex-impulse as a substitute for careful writing, the decay of life thus providing a rather more effortless way of book-making than painting ‘a true and perfect image of life indeed.’ The young-women problem books are, of course, even nastier. That is to be expected. A good young woman is apparently a most uninteresting subject, more uninteresting than a good young man—and that in the view of the novelists is saying a very great deal.

It is not quite that our authors wish us to believe the world is worse than it was, but only that now it doesn’t mind anyone knowing how bad it is.