But evolution is not quite the same thing as revolution. I do believe that revolution is only evolution in a hurry; but revolution can be in too great a hurry, and cover itself with ridicule. When the Futurists propose to suppress the adjective, the adverb, the conjunction, and to make of literature a thing of 'positive substantives' and 'dynamic verbs'--when Mr Peguy repeats over and over again the same sentence because, in his view, that is how we think--we smile. We are both right and wrong to smile, for these people express in the wrong way that which is the right thing. The modern novel has and must have a new significance. It is not enough that the novelist should be cheery as Dickens, or genially cynical as Thackeray, or adventurous as Fielding. The passions of men, love, hunger, patriotism, worship, all these things must now be shared between the novelist and his reader. He must collaborate with his audience ... emulate the show-girls in a revue, abandon the stage, and come parading through the stalls. A new passion is born, and it is a complex of the old passions; the novelist of to-day cannot end as Montaigne, say that he goes to seek a great perhaps. He needs to be more positive, to aspire to know what we are doing with the working-class, with the Empire, the woman question, and the proper use of lentils. It is this aspiration towards truth that breaks up the old form: you cannot tell a story in a straightforward manner when you do but glimpse it through the veil of the future.
And so it goes hard with Edwin and Angeline. We have no more time to tell that love; we need to break up their simple story, to consider whether they are eugenically fitted for each other, and whether their marriage settlement has a bearing upon national finance. Inevitably we become chaotic; the thread of our story is tangled in the threads which bind the loves of all men. We must state, moralise, explain, analyse motives, because we try to fit into a steam civilisation the old horse-plough of our fathers. I do not think that we shall break the old plough; now and then we may use it upon sands, but there is much good earth for it to turn.
Sincerity: the Publisher and the Policeman