Abstract
"I CANNOT bring myself to judge my fellows," Somerset Maugham writes in The Summing Up, the review of his own long literary career. "I am quite content to observe them." He is decidedly averse to "preaching"-in other words, to a literature of ideas. He has made a creative principle of the observer's position in literature. If we are to believe him, Maugham has never passed judgment on people for what is evil in them and never praised the good. He has tried to remain dispassionate and objective, persistently cultivating the quality of tolerance-a virtue which suggests, if not insensibility, at any rate a certain lukewarm quality. With characteristic candor Maugham admits that human beings interest him only insofar as they furnish material for his work. It would seem therefore that he collects characters as the stamp collector collects postage stamps. Thus Maugham has long had the reputation of an astute, ironic and unerring master of his art, a gentleman writer who with a certain aloofness and indulgence takes stock of the vicissitudes of his fellow men.
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