SOURCE: “A Sort of Answer,” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 12, No. 3, July, 1962, pp. 347-51.

In the following response to the critics E. B. Greenwood, R. A. Copland, and R. W. Jolly, Bateson reasserts his claim that the realistic devices Mansfield uses to describe the character of the boss make him not only unsympathetic but a symbol of the very “society which destroyed itself, and a million innocent victims with it, between 1914 and 1918.”

Our three critics have raised so many points—several of them, I agree, eminently sensible ones—that I shall not attempt to answer them all here and now. What we set out to provide, as we made clear in our sub-title, was ‘a critical exercise’—not a model critical essay. We weren't entering into competition with Dr. Johnson on Shakespeare or Matthew Arnold on Wordsworth. An ‘exercise’ makes no claims to originality or profundity; what it...