Two TQSs, signed "W. Somerset Maugham," on individual off-white sheets. In the first, he comments on "Modern Poets," in full: "I should be content with less cleverness if only they had more feeling. They make little songs not from great sorrows but from the sober pleasures of a good education." In the second, he appraises "The Modern Novel" at an international level, in part: "Tolstoi and Turgenev, but chiefly Dostoievsky, offered an emotion that was different from any offered by the novels of other countries. They made the greatest novels of Western Europe look artificial. Their novelty made me unfair to Thackeray, Dickens and Trollope, with their conventional morality; and even the great writers of France, Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert, in comparison seemed formal and a little frigid." In overall fine condition.
