How they Struck a Contemporary by Oscar Wilde

There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make / it too true, and _The Black Arrow_ is so inartistic as not to contain a / single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll / reads dangerously like an experiment out of the _Lancet_. As for Mr. / Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly / magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius that / when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels bound to invent a / personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of / cowardly corroboration. Nor are our other novelists much better. Mr. / Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon / mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style, / his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire. Mr. Hall Caine, it / is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his / voice. He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr. James Payn / is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He hunts / down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. As / one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes almost / unbearable. The horses of Mr. William Black's phaeton do not soar / towards the sun. They merely frighten the sky at evening into violent / chromolithographic effects. On seeing them approach, the peasants take / refuge in dialect. Mrs. Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates, lawn- / tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome things. Mr. Marion / Crawford has immolated himself upon the altar of local colour. He is / like the lady in the French comedy who keeps talking about "le beau ciel / d'Italie."

Besides, he has fallen into the bad habit of uttering moral / platitudes. He is always telling us that to be good is to be good, and / that to be bad is to be wicked. At times he is almost edifying. _Robert / Elsmere_ is of course a masterpiece -- a masterpiece of the "genre / ennuyeux," the one form of literature that the English people seems / thoroughly to enjoy. A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that / it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in / the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and we can quite believe it. / Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced. England / is the home of lost ideas. As for that great and daily increasing school / of novelists for whom the sun always rises in the East-End, the only / thing that can be said about them is that they find life crude, and leave / it raw. -- _The Decay of Lying_.