What is remarkable is the portrait not only of Sponge, but of the whole society in which he moves. It is an extraordinarily tough society, without any of that self-consciousness which belongs to Hemingway's heroes. The men are tough as a matter of course... Probably Surtees owes this success to that observant eye and candour of speech which is his chief force as a writer. He has no cant of any kind; he is sucking up to nobody and no class. He has his moral standards, but he is not trying to preach them; there is none of that sense that we have, even in Trollope, of the moralizer... He writes of what he sees and knows, with a reckless sincerity especially refreshing in these self-conscious times.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "What is remarkable is the portrait not only of Sponge, but of the whole society in which he moves. It is an extraordinarily tough society, without any of that self-consciousness which belongs to Hemingway's heroes. The men are tough as a matter of course... Probably Surtees owes this success to that observant eye and candour of speech which is his chief force as a writer. He has no cant of any kind; he is sucking up to nobody and no class. He has his moral standards, but he is not trying to preach them; there is none of that sense that we have, even in Trollope, of the moralizer... He writes of what he sees and knows, with a reckless sincerity especially refreshing in these self-conscious times." in the context of "Joyce Cary in The Sunday Times (1957), reprinted as ‘Introduction’, R. S. Surtees, Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour [1853] (1982), pp. ix–xi" to mean that wisdom is timeless.