At this time of
day it all seems ancient and distant enough; the book has been praised,
blamed, lifted up, hurled down a thousand times, and has finally been
discovered to be a book of promise, of natural talent, with a great deal of
crudity and melodrama and a little beauty. It does not stand of course in
comparison with Peter Westcott's later period and yet it has a note that
his hand never captured afterwards. How incredibly bad it is in places,
the Datchett incidents, with their flames and screams and murder in the
dark, sufficiently betray: how fine it can be such a delight as The Cherry
Orchard chapter shows, and perhaps the very badness of the crudities helped
in its popularity, for there was nothing more remarkable about it than the
fashion in which it captured every class of reader. But its success, in
reality, was a result of the exact moment of its appearance. Had Peter
waited a thousand years he could not possibly have chosen a time more
favourable. It was that moment in literary history, when the world had had
enough of lilies and was turning, with relief, to artichokes. There was a
periodical of this time entitled _The Green Volume_. This appeared
somewhere about 1890 and it brought with it a band of young men and women
who were exceedingly clever, saw the quaintness of life before its reality
and stood on tiptoe in order to observe things that were really growing
quite close to the ground.
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