[In the following excerpt, Walkley offers positive comments on Genevra's Money.]

There is one saying that I often wish Elia had added to his essays on Popular Fallacies: Easy writing makes hard reading. In the long run, if a man writes easily, it is because he is, like the M.P. who introduced the Liquor Bill, full of his subject; or, even if he be full of emptiness, he is in a blithe mood. In either case the reader profits; he will have gained something, either knowledge or, what is much better, happiness. No easy writings make more happy readings for me than do those of Mr. E. V. Lucas. (It is easy to see why, with E.V.L. at the back of my head, my thoughts turned to Lamb.) I have never seen Mr. Lucas write, but I am sure that he does it easily. (If you come to that, one never does, in actual life, see an author writing. One reads how Flaubert did it—seeking le mot juste in agony and then erasing the whole sentence in despair—it must have been deadly to watch. I have seen Shakespeare writing on the stage, with his eyes cast up to Heaven and swinging a formidable quill pen as though it were a mashie, and I have seen Mr. Shaw—or was it Mr. Zangwill?—writing, like mad, on the film; and in neither case was seeing believing.) Mr. Lucas cannot but write easily because he writes so much. I have counted over forty "other works by the same author" on the fly-leaf of his new book Genevra's Money. This is the sort of thing to make an idler envious and ashamed; and I think it speaks well for my candour that I am willing to admit the happiness that this indefatigable and easy writer's works give me. Mr. Lucas is, I know, universally praised, and perhaps I ought to have taken the other line and hinted that "some of the praise has been injudicious," as is said by a reviewer in the Literary Supplement about another writer very dear to me, M. Marcel Proust. Well, well, there are some inexorably judicious temperaments to which any hearty praise seems "injudicious." What did Vauvenargues say? "It is a great sign of mediocrity always to praise moderately."

Of all the ties that bind a reader to his author there is none so pleasant as the discovery of some intimate personal experience shared between them. I shall never forget my delight when I found that the shop (Twining's in the Strand) where I happened to get my tea was the identical one where, a century and more ago, Jane Austen used to buy hers. And judge of my gratification at finding that Mr. Lucas was once upon a time as fond as I was of potatoes baked in a bonfire. If I have hitherto kept this trait of childhood from the knowledge of my friends, it is because I have supposed there to be something perverse and morbid in it (for the potatoes were never quite "done" in the middle); but the uncle in Genevra's Money is quite open about it:—

Suddenly a whiff of burning leaves mixed with the keen air, and in a moment I was a child again, so curiously can a scent restore the past. No, not restore it—no such happy fortune as that—but recall it.

In a corner of our old home garden there was a continuous rubbish fire—and about it was our favourite gathering place, our refuge from elders and visitors, our senate, and our restaurant, for we ate there, too, chiefly potatoes cooked under the ashes. Food for the gods—there is nothing with such flavour to-day: cordons bleus wear out their lives in vain. We talked there, plotted there, hid there, sulked there, cried there, railed there against fate and the conspiracy to misunderstand the young, and there in penitential mood promised ourselves we would be better.

The pungent aromatic odours of burning vegetation have never failed to bring back the old impressions, not only of the garden corner, and the actual triumphs and tribulations it witnessed, but of the house, too, the family, the neighbourhood. One whiff is the Open Sesame to so many of the doors of the brain.

If I have spoken of Mr. Lucas's writing as easy, I hope no one will have understood me to imply that it is casual. Consider the cunningly smooth rhythm of these simple sentences. In particular, look at the successive positions of the word "there" in the second paragraph and try to devise a better arrangement, if you can.