Modern Fiction by Virginia Woolf

In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction it / is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the / art is somehow an improvement upon the old. With their simple tools and / primitive materials, it might be said. Fielding did well and Jane Austen / even better, but compare their opportunities with ours! Their / masterpieces certainly have a strange air of simplicity. And yet the / analogy between literature and the process, to choose an example, of / making motor cars scarcely holds good beyond the first glance. It is / doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt / much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making / literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to / do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but / with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed / from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we / make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On / the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to / those happier warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear / so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from / whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It is / for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now / beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose / fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that / certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem / to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this / perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some account.

Our quarrel, then, is not with the classics, and if we speak of / quarrelling with Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy it is partly / that by the mere fact of their existence in the flesh their work has a / living, breathing, every day imperfection which bids us take what / liberties with it we choose. But it is also true that, while we thank / them for a thousand gifts, we reserve our unconditional gratitude for / Mr. Hardy, for Mr. Conrad, and in a much lesser degree for the Mr. / Hudson, of _The Purple Land, Green Mansions_, and _Far Away and Long / Ago_. Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy have excited so many / hopes and disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude largely / takes the form of thanking them for having shown us what they might have / done but have not done; what we certainly could not do, but as / certainly, perhaps, do not wish to do. No single phrase will sum up the / charge or grievance which we have to bring against a mass of work so / large in its volume and embodying so many qualities, both admirable and / the reverse.