[Professor Alfred North Whitehead] once remarked that every philosophy is coloured by a secret imaginative background which does not officially form part of its doctrines. Obviously this is even truer of fiction, but it has perhaps been less noticed that it is truest of all of very low-grade "light" fiction…. As a rule, the more lowbrow the novelist the more thoroughly he gives himself away, like the people who relate their dreams every morning at breakfast….

It is curious that, much as Mr. Wodehouse is read and admired, this aspect of his work never seems to have been studied. He is before all else a "wishful" writer, a dream writer, giving utterance to a vision of life as he would like it to be lived. By their subject-matter ye shall know them, and the subject-matter of Mr. Wodehouse's books is almost invariably the Edwardian house party, the comic man-servant and the idle young man with private means. Behind the farcical incidents there is manifest a vision of life in which the dividends flow in for ever and ever, and the M.C.C. will outlast the Pyramids. I shall no doubt be telling Mr. Wodehouse's admirers most of what they want to know by saying that Quick Service falls into the Blandings Castle group…. The phraseology ("he could even get a certain amount of noise-response out of mashed potatoes") is about up to sample. But what is finally noticeable, as in all Mr. Wodehouse's books, is the complete parasitism of outlook. After reading him steadily for a quarter of a century I cannot remember a single one of his books in which the jeune premier really works for his living. His heroes either have private incomes, like Bertie Wooster, or they end up with some kind of sinecure job in the retinue of a millionaire. And that, however lightly he may choose to treat it, is obviously the way in which he considers it desirable for a young man to live. His whole vision of life was implicit in his first big hit, Mike….

When Mr. Wodehouse was led off into captivity by the Germans, he is said to have remarked to a friend, "Perhaps after this I shall write a serious book." I wonder. It might be very interesting if he did. But what I think is certain is that he cannot continue in the Psmith and Jeeves tradition very much longer. It is already decades out of date. Bertie Wooster is an Edwardian figure, the "knut" of the pre-1914 period, and, incidentally, a much nicer animal than the moneyed young man of to-day. But now the whole of that way of life is being destroyed too completely to survive even in fantasy…. I hope the Germans are treating Mr. Wodehouse decently, and I hope that later on he will write that serious book. Few writers of our time have used words more skilfully, or squandered better talents.