SOURCE: "Development of the English Novel during the Past Thirty Years," in The Modern English Novel, translated by Ben Ray Redman, Alfred A. Knopf, 1925, pp. 117-34.

In the following excerpt, which was originally published in French in 1921, Chevalley contends that Hichens's later works did not fulfill the promise of his earlier writings.

Why has [Robert Hichens] not given us all that he promised? It seems that he has lost himself in an excess of analysis, in a vain effort to attain the inaccessible, which may perhaps be explained by his musical education and his essays in occultism.

In 1894 he published The Green Carnation, a cutting satire on the aesthetic and symbolist movement, which made him famous. An Imaginative Man (1895) contains a curious pathological study, and lays bare the lies of an artificial civilization. Felix (1902) depicts a young Englishman, enamoured of literature, who discovers Balzac's tailor, becomes famous, loses...