That is not all. As an organiser there is no one who has more driving power. He can set himself to committee work, and keep every member of a committee active, himself included. He can, when necessary, pester responsible persons till they are goaded into action. Whilst his attention is always fixed on the central object, he has an eye for the most trifling details.

He is a first-rate business man. He knows as much about the trade of publishing as any publisher. He refuses to employ a literary agent, and personally transacts the business of placing his work—and sometimes that of his friends—in the literary and dramatic market all over the world.

Also he is a man personally benevolent. No one was ever less sentimental or romantic, but he is charitably disposed to everyone whom he does not regard as a fool.

If we examine the records of Mr. Shaw's life we shall see that it has been spent somewhere mid-way between the lives of the man-of-action and the man-of-letters. He has been primarily and essentially a critic of the current ideas about existing facts, the ideas which are pre-supposed in the typical and habitual activities of our modern world. He has been, almost invariably, a destructive critic—a critic of that rare kind which is able to win attention because he himself is so active in this Vandal work of his, because he can make his critical attack in so many different ways, because there seem to be a greater vital force and spirit in his pulling down of gods than ever existed in the gods themselves. Socrates, one would suppose, was not more insistent and unexpected in his gadfly attacks upon the Athenian sophists than is Mr. Shaw in his raids upon the Pharisees of sophisticated London. His biography, when it is written, will be a very fascinating and a very large book, and Mr. Shaw himself thinks that it will be identical with the history of his time. There is already in existence a book which claims to be an authorised "Critical Biography;" and, needless to say, it was written by an American—Dr. Archibald Henderson—who stepped in with superb confidence and compelled Mr. Shaw to criticise, overhaul, and contribute to his daring enterprise. "You can force my hand to some extent," said Mr. Shaw, "for any story that you start will pursue me to all eternity."

This valiant American describes with gusto the active, talking, debating, propagating, protesting life that Mr. Shaw has lived. It has not been a "domestic" life; not even a specially "literary" life. We feel it has been a life in which there has been little privacy or intimacy, that it has seldom been wholly shut off from the market-place and the theatre; that if he is a man entirely destitute of "company manners," this is because he has lived always "in company." He was, of course, born in Ireland, not very far from Dublin. His parents were Protestants belonging to that middle class which is hampered by social pretensions and insufficient worldly means. He was taught at Protestant schools, where he was expected to believe that "Roman Catholics are socially inferior persons, who will go to hell when they die, and leave Heaven in the exclusive possession of ladies and gentlemen." At the age of fifteen he went into a land office and helped to collect rents, without realising, it is to be presumed, that he was contributing to an iniquitous system. He studied pictures in the Irish National Gallery, became interested in music through his mother and her friends, and made his first appearance in print when moved to protest against the evangelistic services of Sankey and Moody. At the age of twenty he turned his back upon Ireland, and started a literary career in London. In the first nine years of "consistent literary drudgery" he succeeded in earning six pounds.

To put it frankly, Mr. Shaw was not born to succeed as "a mere man of letters," and assuredly not as a writer of romances. His own statement that he "exhausted romanticism before he was ten years old" is historically inaccurate. He started a literary career early, but at twenty-nine he was still a romantic young man who had written reams of romantic literature, and had signally failed. He was right to abandon romance; it had never inspired him, and it was entirely natural and human that he should ever after disown and abuse this treacherous mistress. It is characteristic that what really did inspire him and set him moving upon the course ever after to be his own was an event unconnected with those personal, intimate issues of experience which usually feed the flame of imaginative art. It was a debating speech by Henry George which aroused the reforming ardour thenceforward essential and characteristic in Mr. Shaw, a speech which sent him to Karl Marx, and made him a "man with some business in the world." Henry George sent him to Karl Marx, and Karl Marx sent him to that group of clever people among whom were Graham Wallas, Hubert Bland, Sidney Olivier, and—of main importance—Sidney Webb.

"Quite the cleverest thing I ever did in my life," Mr. Shaw is reported to have said to his American interviewer, "was to force my friendship on Webb, to extort his, and keep it." Mr. Sidney Webb was then, as now, the constructive encyclopaedist, the man who, wherever he went, "knew more than anybody present." "The truth of the matter is that Webb and I are very useful to each other. We are in perfect contrast, each supplying the deficiency in the other.... As I am an incorrigible mountebank, and Webb is one of the simplest of geniuses, I have always been in the centre of the stage, whilst Webb has been prompting me, invisible, from the side." It was this singular union more than anything else which gave direction and motive force to the propaganda carried on by the Fabian Society for a quarter of a century, whilst to Mr. Shaw personally it gave the consistency of thought and definiteness of aim which underlie all his later work. We cannot, of course, neglect the intellectual influence of Ibsen and Nietzsche, Wagner and Samuel Butler, the individualists and aristocrats who corrected the mob-sentiment of old-fashioned socialism; but these and similar influences matured in him through his Fabianism.

Bernard Shaw, of the Fabian Society, ceased to be a private citizen. He became a man of "affairs," destined, thenceforward, to live in the publicity of debating-halls, among those ideas which reformers and politicians have actually socialised, removing them from the privacy of human experience and turning them into public property—like parks, open spaces, and wash-houses. I do not mean that he treated this public property as other, and more conventionally-minded, men habitually treat it. Mr. Shaw walks down the Strand as if it were his private bridle-path. He walks across an Insurance Bill or a National Theatre scheme or a policy for giving self-government to Englishmen as a man who might be treading the weeds in his own garden. But the intellectual stage-properties were all prepared for him and presented ready-made in those times when he went night after night to lecture in the city and suburbs of London. He had, indeed, the social cosmopolitanism which made him dissociate himself from small literary coteries and gain a practical knowledge of publicly-minded men. But one cannot fail to see that his long experience of lecturing, debating, setting up arguments, and parrying verbal attacks—which made him the best debater in England, and turned him, as Dr. Henderson has suggested, from a doctrinaire into a "practical opportunist"—served not only to endow him with his consistency as a thinker and his excellence in expounding ideas, but also confirmed him in his defects as a humanist. His continual intercourse with the innumerable fixed ideas of societies and committees, his debater's habit of attacking whatever fixed idea he encounters, have had the effect of organising his own mind along the lines of such fixed ideas, theses, positions and oppositions as could be defended or countered by his boundless resource in argument, wit, and raillery; and it followed that his interpretation of life was likely to resolve itself into the debater's generalisations, the partialities and half-truths which ignore what is individual, personal, intimate, and finest—for the finest things in life are those which cannot be generalised, which are individual and unique, which admit of being stated but not argued. It follows also that his strength is in attack and in destructive criticism. The only important positive ideas for which he stands are the Supermannish idea of the duty of every man to be himself to the utmost, and a generous democratic idea of freedom, in accordance with which every self-respecting man and woman should be given the opportunity to work out his or her own destiny fully, unhampered by the tyrannies of caste, prestige, sentimental traditions, false codes, and effete moral obligations.

But these ideas are of very considerable magnitude. They are capable of almost infinite extension and application to life. And it should be observed that, though Mr. Shaw thinks mainly about obvious "public questions"—politics, the professions, the institution of marriage, patriotism, public oratory, public health, etc., he has nothing in common with the unimaginative public man who merely criticises proposals and policies. He is always interested in the state of mind which produces proposals and policies. When he pleads for the abolition of the Dramatic Censorship before a Royal Commission, he gives us not only the most effective practical exposure of the Censorship that has ever been written, but also a far-reaching philosophical analysis of liberty as freedom to express and propagate ideas. "My reputation has been gained by my persistent struggle to force the public to reconsider its morals," he says in the Rejected Statement, the presentation of which to the Royal Commission affords one of those delightful true stories that only a Shaw can make so damaging. "I write plays with the deliberate object of converting the nation to my opinion in these matters." That he has to a large extent already converted the intellectuals—whether by his plays or by other means—is beyond question. Many of the most powerful writers of the last ten years have concentrated their efforts on exposing the tyranny of the established idea and the established moral code. Such diverse writers as Mr. Wells, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Granville Barker, Mr. Cunninghame-Graham, Mr. Belloc, and Mr. Chesterton have written books the motives of which have been satire, divine anger, saeva indignatio, directed against the established moral codes or intellectual habits of the time. Mr. Shaw, who originally followed the obscure Samuel Butler, showed the way for the others. His method was, and is, to combine argument with the more telling weapon of ridicule. In his Preface to Blanco Posnet he exposes and ridicules the Dramatic Censorship, just as in Getting Married he exposes and ridicules the popular conception of happy domestic life, and in like manner in The Doctor's Dilemma the superstition that the faculty of medicine is infallible.

The picture of concerted professional fraud given us in The Doctor's Dilemma is not too exaggerated for the purposes of a debating argument; but in his long essay on the subject he gives a far more reasonable statement of the case. He does not treat the doctor as a murderer, or a pickpocket, or a human vulture, or even a cold-blooded cynic; he explains what is likely to happen to the ordinary, moderately decent, normal man, without any special moral or intellectual equipment, who becomes a doctor. "As to the honour and conscience of doctors, they have as much as any other class of men, no more and no less. And what other men," he adds characteristically, "dare pretend to be impartial where they have a strong pecuniary interest on one side?" He analyses the psychology of the practitioner and the specialist. He shows how much guesswork there must be where even the most distinguished differ; in what manner we are all handed over, bound, to the tender mercies of the men who are often poor, overworked, unscientific, and, if they are specialists, prejudiced by exclusive study of one disease. What he says about the surgeon and the specialist is nearer to the truth than what he says about the general practitioner. Long experience of all sorts of illnesses is more valuable for the curing of simple diseases than much so-called "scientific knowledge;" and, as it happens, the life of the general practitioner who comes into sympathetic contact with so many men and women of different types is one which does promote certain healthy cynicisms and human decencies singularly lacking in the specialist on the one side and the routine-driven hospital nurse on the other. But there we have the individual equation. Mr. Shaw is good at considering general cases; he is never, in his writing, much concerned about individuals.

The essay which preceded Getting Married is stronger in its attack than in its reconstructive proposals; and the essay is better than the play, because Mr. Shaw can present arguments more effectively than persons, and arguments are more suited to essays than to plays. It is interesting to find him confessing that "young women come to me and ask me whether they ought to consent to marry the man they have decided to live with." Mr. Shaw, of course, urges them "on no account to compromise themselves without the security of an authentic wedding-ring." He should not have been surprised. He, if anyone, should have known that if you attack an existing morality, the public will inevitably think you are advocating the corresponding "immorality" as popularly understood; and one suspects that Mr. Shaw has, from this natural misunderstanding, more to answer for than he himself dreams of. When he calls himself "an immoralist," he means that he is the true moralist; that he is going to substitute for a decayed, outworn, conventional, and stupid morality, a morality based upon a rational human principle—a morality that will make society better and more tolerable. In this particular essay he asks us to get rid of the idea that the family, as at present constituted, is the highest form of human co-partnership. "The people who talk and write as if the highest attainable state is that of a family stewing in love continuously from the cradle to the grave can hardly have given five minutes' serious consideration to so outrageous a proposition."

Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo. Its grave danger to the nation lies in its narrow views, its unnaturally sustained and spitefully jealous concupiscences, its petty tyrannies, its false social pretences, its endless grudges and squabbles, its sacrifice of the boy's future by setting him to earn money to help the family when he should be in training for his adult life (remember the boy Dickens and the blacking factory), and of the girl's chances by making her a slave to sick or selfish parents, its unnatural packing into little brick boxes of little parcels of humanity of ill-assorted ages, with the old scolding or beating the young for behaving like young people, and the young hating and thwarting the old for behaving like old people, and all the other ills, mentionable and unmentionable, that arise from excessive segregation. It sets these evils up as benefits and blessings representing the highest attainable degree of honour and virtue, whilst any criticism of or revolt against them is savagely persecuted as the extremity of vice.

But when Mr. Shaw begins to reconstruct, and thinks that the whole matter can be solved by such simple—and so far as they go, excellent—economic expedients as making women economically independent, and legitimising children, he ceases to be persuasive. There comes a point when brilliant cleverness and sheer logic from necessity miss the truth. It is precisely the cut-and-dried Fabian side of Mr. Shaw which blinds him to facts of a certain sort—the fact, for instance, that for certain human needs no ingenious, or invented, rational remedy is possible; that in certain departments of life where the great instincts are concerned the accumulated conscious and subconscious experience of thousands of years of mankind have produced a kind of instinctive knowledge which logic cannot tamper with; which is bound up with human nature and is near to a thousand subtle truths never yet brought within the scope of scientific knowledge; which it is dangerous to attack by a brutal frontal assault, as if the issue were a single and simple debating issue; which is defied only under just such penalties as Mr. Shaw himself alludes to.

It is already evident why Mr. Shaw is far better as lecturer, debater, pamphleteer, and writer of critical essays than as writer of either romances or plays. He is primarily a social reformer, like Henry George and Karl Marx, though he brings more wit, cleverness, driving power, and intellectual agility to bear upon his subjects. He is interested in public morality and "affairs," in generalities rather than individuals, in ideas about life rather than in life at first hand. He sees through the intellect rather than through the perceptions. He is concerned to prove and to teach rather than to show. He has made very few characters in his plays, for the simple reason that he handicaps his persons by treating them as ideas rather than as persons. This is to say, that as an artist he is never disinterested; he is more concerned with the case which his puppets are set up to prove than with a situation for its own sake. In Caesar and Cleopatra he did for once allow a subject to exist for its own sake. He had no axe to grind, primarily, on behalf of society and its morals. It is not perhaps the cleverest of his plays, but it is the play which is most a play; and if it is not a great play, that is because Mr. Shaw is not a great dramatist—he has not allowed himself to be a great imaginative artist—he turned his back upon imaginative art at the age of twenty-nine.

In the cleverest of his plays there is, indeed, always one real person, and that person is none other than himself. In Man and Superman, in Arms and the Man, and in John Bull's Other Island, the hero is in each case nothing more nor less than a new impersonation of Bernard Shaw. (In John Bull's Other Island I take Larry Doyle as the hero.) The hero is a man who on every possible occasion either gets up and argues with extraordinary fluency and good sense as if he were a very brilliant young man in a debate, or else is forced into the sort of action which that brilliant debater would have advocated. Broadbent, in John Bull's Other Island, is not a person at all; he is a brilliantly conceived caricature of English stupidity; he is a general idea, not an individual. Even Keegan, who has been extolled as a romantic and unusual figure among the Shavian dramatis personae, is a chorus rather than a character, and essentially Shavian in that his ideals are vegetarian, and that his language is couched in such terms as—

How will you drag our acres from the ferret's grip of Matthew Haffigan? How will you persuade Cornelius Doyle to forego the pride of being a small landowner? How will Barney Doran's millrace agree with your motor-boats?... Perhaps I had better vote for an efficient devil that knows his own mind and his own business than for a foolish patriot who has no mind and no business.

That is not the way in which priests, madmen, or idealists talk in Ireland. It is the way they talk at the Fabian Society.

The present writer is fully aware of the great work which Mr. Shaw has done. He yields to no one in his admiration for the strength of character and the spirited eagerness which have made him so effective in his onslaught upon pernicious illusions, in making people look beyond the formula and refuse to be blinded by social taboos. But it is just because his influence is so great and in many respects beneficial that we ought to be on our guard against a man who may not always mesmerise us to our advantage. And it is in the matter of the drama and the fine arts in general that Mr. Shaw is proving a dangerous Messiah. He has done much to cleanse the Augean stables of the English theatre. He has discredited though he has not destroyed the artificial "drawing-room play;" he has poured ridicule upon the so-called "well-made play" which Scribe, Sardou, and their school could concoct for the delight of Frenchmen; he has exposed the insignificance of the accidents and catastrophes, and the coming down of the curtain "on a hero slain or married." He has compelled sensible people to look to the theatre for something more than sentiment, romance, ingenuity; for something relevant to the larger issues of life. That he has done; and it is doubtful if any English-speaking and English-writing man now alive, excepting Mr. Shaw, could have done it with any thoroughness.

But having freed us from these old tyrannies of the stage, he has not rested there. He has imposed new tyrannies of his own which are sanctioned either by his own extraordinary influence or by that swing of the Time-Spirit of which he is the visible pendulum. He is very persuasive, and puts his case so well that he is able to blind us to false issues. He states his case in the Preface which he wrote to Three Plays by Brieux. Brieux is for him the greatest French dramatist since Moliere; and more important because whilst Moliere was content to indict human nature, Brieux devotes his energy to an indictment of society. "His fisticuffs are not aimed heavenward: they fall on human noses for the good of human souls."

When he sees human nature in conflict with a political abuse he does not blame human nature, knowing that such blame is the favourite trick of those who wish to perpetuate the abuse without being able to defend it. He does not even blame the abuse: he exposes it, and then leaves human nature to tackle it with its eyes open....

You do not go away from a Brieux play with the feeling that the affair is finished or the problem solved for you by the dramatist.... You come away with a very disquieting sense that you are involved in the affair, and must find the way out of it for yourself and everybody else if civilisation is to be tolerable to your sense of honour.

All this is unmistakable. Mr. Shaw regards the theatre primarily and essentially as a substitute for the pulpit, as a convenient lecture-hall for the propaganda of Shavian socialism. He takes it for granted that there is to be a social "problem;" that "fisticuffs" are to be aimed at somebody's nose as they were in those delightful games of play in which he indulged as a young and earnest Fabian; that the audience is to come away tuned up to social endeavour just as people come away from Revival meetings tuned up to the tasks of spiritual salvation.

This is well enough. Upon two conditions, I agree that there would be no objection to Mr. Shaw or any other dramatist using the theatre as a means of reforming men; these conditions being, firstly, that he is able to do it—which I doubt; and secondly, that he should not insist that this use of the theatre is the only proper and legitimate use.

Mr. Shaw has not yet been able to use the theatre in this way, and still less, Brieux. Brieux's influence in France is mainly due to the fact that he is a brilliant and eloquent lecturer. Mr. Shaw's influence in England is due to his essays, speeches, conversations, personal vehemence, and ubiquity. People go to see his plays because they are very witty; they understand them and think they are convinced by them only when they have read and digested his far more convincing Prefaces. The reason why it is impossible to be profoundly interested in his plays is because he is not profoundly interested in them himself. He evidently wrote them without being excited about his persons, their experiences, or the emotions which the situation drew from them; he was excited about his case, about the moral or social truth which his puppets could be made to illustrate. There is much ingenious arrangement, much plausible argument, and abundant wit. What really does delight us is the often irrelevant wit of the conversation, and this because Mr. Shaw himself delights in irrelevant wit; it is only when he is writing wittily and irrelevantly that he is disinterested, that he is doing something for its own sake, that he is writing in the only way in which an artist can write effectively. But in so far as he is aiming at something other than a significant presentation of life—and he generally is—he is attempting to "indict" society, to show up abuses, to expose political and social sores; he is ceasing to be interested in his subject, his persons, his play; he is forcing human nature out of itself; he is distorting it; he is making it unreal; he is creating monsters—and no dramatist, no artist of any kind, can deal effectively with monsters. When he writes a play, Mr. Shaw attempts to do two completely different things at one and the same time—to present life, and to deduce an arguable and preconceived conclusion about life. If he has not completely failed, that is because he has not completely lived up to his theories.

It is not Mr. Shaw's fault that so many of the cleverest younger writers of the time allow themselves to be led away by his example. But that they are so led away—not only in drama, but in the kindred art of fiction—is a fact so important that it requires statement. Mr. Shaw is entitled to his own opinion that "what we want as the basis of our plays and novels is not romance, but a really scientific natural history;" he is quite right, if he feels it to be his own particular function, to spend his whole force in "indicting" society. But how terrible a loss in human interest and vitality if all our creative artists are to occupy themselves in this process of "indictment"—indictment being at all times the antithesis of fair criticism and presentment. I would venture to suggest that human life, roughly speaking, may be divided into two great parts, one of which is completely tabooed by Mr. Shaw. These two parts or aspects of life may be named and envisaged in a hundred different ways. Aristotle called them the "practical" and the "theoretic." The Roman Church called them the "temporal" and the "spiritual." The social philosophers called them the "State" and the "Individual." They may be called "Science" and "Art," "Politics" and "Poetry," "Public" and "Private," "Social" and "Personal," "Public Work" (Shaw) and "The Will of God," "Philanthropy" and "Friendship," "Justice" and "Mercy," "Humanitarian" and "Human." Each second term in these categories is cut clean out of modern life by Mr. Shaw. When he says that "Ibsen was to the last fascinating and full of a strange moving beauty," he says it as if he were reproaching Ibsen. His whole influence is thrown on to the side of an austere common sense which destroys emotion because it may become fanaticism, which laughs at sentiment because it may be perverted into nonsense, which is as Puritanically cruel to the insidious blandishments of romance as Plato was cruel to the poets.

Is it fanciful to imagine that it is with the Irishman as I have always fancied it was with the Greek philosopher, that by reason of his own knowledge of the dangerous burning fever of poetry, from his own susceptibility to its enchantments, he decided to crown the poets with garlands and banish them to another city? That, indeed, is an idle fancy. Mr. Shaw exists to prove that there are Irishmen who do not suffer from the intoxication of beauty, who are not susceptible to the windy ardours of romance. Nevertheless Mr. Shaw, too, has his romance. He learnt it in the eager, fighting days when he held up the standard of Fabianism before the blinking eyes of suburban audiences; when he learnt to detest the silly ways of silly people whose silliness was feebly glorified under the names of morality, religion, sentiment, and patriotism; whose qualities he soon found himself exposing in the manner habitual to the trained debater. But this was no ordinary debater. There were conviction, sincerity, and even romantic—God save the word!—romantic zeal behind this fire of argument, laughter, repartee. Life had become for him, as he said to Dr. Henderson, "a sort of splendid torch, which I have got hold of for the moment." It became his business "to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."



II

H.G. WELLS

Mr. Shaw has said that his biography will be the history of his time. In like manner we might say of Mr. Wells that his life has represented the English life of his time. The former has touched this English life at a thousand points, but he has touched it from the outside. The latter has been an integral part of it, a part which has sprung into consciousness of itself, so that he has written from within outwards. Inevitably in writing about the England of his time he has found himself writing about that England of which he himself is symbolic. Mr. Shaw is amazingly clever in generalising about England, in reducing England to formulae, in expressing the ideas which her life and society have stirred in his logical mind. But Mr. Wells has felt this national life within himself; he has known it by conscious and subconscious experience, this experience being with him a kind of instinct developing into self-knowledge, and so into a more objective and philosophical perception. You can tell from Mr. Shaw's light, debonair, and laughing manner, just as you might guess from his rather hard and unemotional writing, that experience of living has laid no heavy toll upon his temperament. How different that nervous and slightly self-conscious manner of Mr. Wells, that exterior geniality which never wholly possesses the man, a cover, as it were, to those inner springs of consciousness to which he has evidently referred the world!

It was strange when these two men, presenting so marked a contrast, confronted each other at the Fabian Society—that association of well-informed, constructive, slightly academic Socialists to which both at the time belonged. It was evident that Bernard Shaw, supported by Sidney Webb, standing for a perfectly clear-cut policy and program, should win the day against a man whose appeal was essentially to something not clear-cut, not defined, but to instinct and psychology. I have been told that Mr. Wells was never able to put forward a coherent program, to state an intelligible case—but all that I know for certain is that it was not intelligible to the Fabians. It is probable enough that his program, as a program, was defective, for whilst it is perfectly easy to define a simple, definite, not widely inclusive policy of action, it is far harder to define that side of the life of a nation which belongs to temperament and instinct. This was what Mr. Wells had in mind; but the social reformers to whom he addressed himself preferred a definite scheme touching the surface of life to an indefinite scheme which aimed at the centre. So Mr. Wells ceased to be a Fabian, and became a Tory-Socialist.

I suggest that Mr. Wells' life and activity may be taken as symbolical of the life of his time. He has told his own story again and again in his novels; it is his own story that he has been telling when he unfolds his ideas about the society in which we live. He, more than any other considerable living writer, seems to have been born to realise within the microcosm of his own experience the social evolution which most of us see in the macrocosm of the nation—an evolution which has been observed by Mr. Bennett with equal clearness, but in a less personal and subjective way, with more detachment. All of us know from the study of history in what way England has changed in the last hundred years—how scientific thought suddenly gained a new importance when it was applied to industry—how the shell of feudalism survived its vitality when the great factory towns began to dominate the country—how all the classes were shuffled and left unsettled—how the cities spread out in disorderly suburbs and slums, without plan or direction—how men and women became factory workers and office workers without knowing why, most of them scantily educated, housed as the competing jerry-builders thought fit, and flung into the maelstrom of competitive labour. All this we knew in a certain sense, but it was Mr. Wells more than anyone else who made us aware of this national life by presenting it in the only possible effective way, the imaginative way. It may almost be said that he gave it to us as an impressionistic account of his own life. He had lived in all this; the social system, or lack of system, had expressed itself in him; and finally he became conscious of all those elements about him and in him which had left their deep impression. Most of us have had an experience in some way similar, though not many of us have been so intimately acquainted with so many classes, so many varieties of people, or have felt our experiences so acutely. He was singular in that he found his way to an expression of those effects which the national life had had upon him—that is to say, upon a man who had been brought up in a lower middle-class family in the Victorian era, who had watched the London suburbs creeping outwards, who had lived among shop-assistants, who had studied science in laboratories, who had aspired to something more fruitful for the spirit. He did not become aware of these significances all at once. The first eager desire to express himself and create took the form of those early romantic stories—The Invisible Man, The Descent of the Martians, The Time Machine, etc.—stories in which his knowledge of science and Jules Verne were not yet allied to a philosophic enthusiasm for human beings in society. Then he began to be conscious of the great problems of society, and generalised about them in his romantic, ingenious, philosophically imaginative way in such books as Anticipations, A Modern Utopia, etc., until he began to realise that that personal method which he had adopted in Kipps was the best method of expressing the consciousness now awake in him of his own life, of his relations with the people he had met and the country he had lived in, and of the vague, restless desires—desires cast in the mould of this material world, yet half mystical in their nature—which had first made him percipient, then critical and dissatisfied, then critical and irritable, then critical and religious, and afterwards—it remains to be seen.

It was in Tono-Bungay that Mr. Wells achieved an unquestionable success. When he wrote that book it seemed that all the experiences of which hitherto he had been only partially conscious became clear to him; that all the clever but unrelated literary efforts which he had hitherto made found here their clue and connecting link, their inspired synthesis. Long before this he had written astonishing, ingenious, philosophic, shrewd, suggestive books, but he had achieved no success on this scale. Here he seemed to have brought together all the threads of his many intellectual energies, and woven them into a single fabric fit for wear-and-tear and adornment. At the first he had written romances such as Jules Verne would have been glad to write; he had gone on to project new worlds constructed after analysis of the present, or in anticipation of the future, or ideally from the ideal; he had written comic stories and weird stories, and one or two true stories; and he had turned to economics and political science with reforming zeal. But here we have it all again, not in parts, but as a comprehensive whole, in a novel which asks us to consider every class in the social ladder in modern England, which questions the whole organisation of our society, which raises central questions about birth, marriage, religion, death, and survival, and presents the whole as a personal and human affair.

Mr. Wells set himself to this task in his own queer, plodding, English way. To the niceties of style and form he paid little attention. He tells the story as best he can, in his own slangy, cumbrous, Latin-English, but idiomatic way—there is little selection or self-suppression, but he makes his points. He draws from a copious store. Considered as social satire, it is an exposure of the silliness and futility of our system of competitive capitalism superimposed on feudalism. Or you may take it as a book of adventure, and find our hero and his erratic uncle plunging into orgies of hazardous exploits and achievements. Or you may take it as a novel of love, and languish with the hero in a misdirected amour, and burn with him in a glorious, futile, and tragic affection. Or you may take it as a novel of England, of the many currents of English life joining in one vast stream on which the barque of the narrator floats. "'This,' it came to me, 'is England. This is what I wanted to give in my book. This!'" And this, the vision which comes to Mr. Wells through a kind of instinct about the life he has experienced and sought to convey—the vague dream that haunts and baffles him—the desired, intangible, dimly-felt, but unknown thing—is offered as a kind of mystical solution to the insoluble problem of an imperfect world.

The title—it is typical of Mr. Wells—suggests at once the farcical element in the whole thing. Tono-Bungay—a quack medicine, "slightly injurious rubbish" sold at "one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle, including the Government stamp." We can only approach Tono-Bungay, which is modern and representative of our whole industrial system, by way of something prior to it—the old social order which exists only as a tradition, which is maintained as a vast, stupid, demoralising pretence, undermined by Tono-Bungayism. The old order, in Mr. Wells' language, is called the Bladesover System, Bladesover being the house where "I," George Ponderevo, the housekeeper's son—one of the many incarnations of the author himself—was born, brought up, and acquired his first impressions of life.

The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers, and the servants in their stations and degrees seemed to me, I say, to be a closed and complete social system. About us were other villages and great estates, and from house to house, interlacing, correlated, the gentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The country towns seemed mere collections of shops, marketing-places for the tenantry, centres for such education as they needed, as entirely dependent on the gentry as the village and scarcely less directly so. I thought this was the order of the whole world.

"All this fine appearance was already sapped." George himself, as a boy, had already begun to "question the final rightness of the gentlefolks," declaring his rebellion by "resolving to marry a viscount's daughter" and blacking the eye of her half-brother. He is transported to the house of Nicodemus Frapp, baker, of Chatham, where he again rebels, this time against the threat of being burned for ever in Hell. Thence he is taken to the house of his uncle Ponderevo, chemist, of Wimblehurst, a small town dominated, like Bladesover, by the landed gentry tradition. And he finds in this uncle, whose name is soon to become a household word throughout the country, a veritable embodiment of the new spirit which is invading the Bladesover system and altering England. Mr. Ponderevo is restless and discontented. He does not like Wimblehurst. "One rubs along. But there's no development—no growth. They just come along here and buy pills when they want 'em—and a horse-ball or such. They've got to be ill before there's a prescription. That sort they are. You can't get 'em to launch out, you can't get 'em to take up anything new."

Mr. Ponderevo, being bankrupt, moves to London, and in the course of time George, now a student of science, follows him. New vistas of life open up in the midst of this vast, overgrown, "purposeless," "dingy" city. Nobody since Dickens has given us the impression of London in all its multitudinous, dismal-gay activities as Mr. Wells gives it us. But it is no longer the London of Dickens. It is a "great, stupid giantess," a "city of Bladesover ... parasitically occupied, insidiously replaced by alien, unsympathetic, and irresponsible elements." It was a chaotic mass of houses built for the middle-class Victorian families. And even while these houses were being run up:

Means of transit were developing to carry the moderately prosperous middle-class families out of London; education and factory employment were whittling away at the supply of rough hard-working, obedient girls who would stand the subterranean drudgery of these places; new classes of hard-up middle-class people such as my uncle, employees of various types, were coming into existence, for whom no homes were provided. None of these classes have ideas of what they ought to be, or fit in any legitimate way into the Bladesover theory that dominates our minds. It was nobody's concern to see them housed under civilised conditions, and the beautiful laws of supply and demand had free play.

It was such a London, such an England, which offered itself invitingly to the predatory ambitions of Mr. Ponderevo, so that out of a simple concoction of drugs and water he was able to capture the money of hundreds of thousands who fondly believed that Tono-Bungay would give them new vigour and zest in life. Mr. Wells describes to us the sudden rise and development of Mr. Ponderevo, to whose fortunes those of George are linked; he tells us how he grows in importance, how he moves into houses larger and larger to suit his new place in the social scale, how vast a position he comes to hold in the financial world of London, in the philanthropic world, and, of course, in the social world.

It is whilst he is interesting us in George and his associates that Mr. Wells makes us aware also of the higher unit of society and the whole strange fraud of modern life, the pretence that there has been no change when conditions have radically changed and are still changing. The theory of the old order broods over the new, chaotic, haphazard world which flings people up and down, sets their whole life—birth, marriage, possessions, happiness—at the mercy of mere chance. In the love interest which is an important part of the story he presents the modern treatment of marriage and sex as another disastrous example of muddling and disorder.

But he does not dwell long or didactically on each of these problems. They arise naturally and inevitably, as a part of human life, in the course of his story of adventure and love. He does not pretend to solve the perplexing questions. The hero feels that he is "like a man floundering in a universe of soap-suds, up and down, east and west." "I can't stand it. I must get my foot on something solid or—I don't know what." Behind it all, in its chaos and ugliness, he does not lose the sense of something other and better, a vague but insistent ideal cherished by the spirit. "There is something links things for me, a sunset or so, a mood or so, the high air, something there was in Marion's form and colour, something I find and lose in Mantegna's pictures, something in the lines of these boats I make."

There, evidently enough, is something that the artist, the poet even, wants. It is the mystical need, the desideratum, expressed in terms of this world's goods—"Marion's form and colour," "Mantegna's pictures," the lines of a boat. If there is any solution here, let it be noted that it is essentially an individual, a personal solution, the artist's solution of the world-problem in terms of what is personally significant to individuals. But when applied to men and women in the mass, how thin and watery this ideal becomes, how unsubstantial and shadowy, how unsuited to the collective needs of society, which are practical and material. Every man in his public, social capacity must necessarily express his ideals in a material and practical form; the mystical side can only find expression in the private life, in the personal way which is the way of art and individual intercourse. But when Mr. Wells became dimly aware of the personal equation in life and the personal ideal, he, who had already dedicated himself to the treatment of social problems and men in the mass, attempted, by mystical contradiction, to identify the private and the public, the ideal with the material, the free with the bound. To make my meaning clearer, I will recall again the incident at the Fabian Society. It is just as if Mr. Wells had gone to that mixed gathering of austere and flippant socialists, and had said, "We want something to link things for us; we must remember the things that men cherish most of all, a sunset or so, a mood or so, the high air. When we are settling the women's question, we must not forget that Marion cares more about her form and colour than about her vote; and if we are nationalising the great masters, let us remember that there is something we may find and lose in a single Mantegna more important to us than all the galleries in the world. The derelict 'Victory,' with her romantic lines, means as much to the nation as the biggest Dreadnought in the world."

And we can imagine Mr. Shaw getting up to question the novelist. "Will Mr. Wells explain to us how the State is going to preserve Marion's colour? Does he propose to arrange sunset effects on Primrose Hill? Will he describe the apparatus by which he intends to capture and bottle the high air, and distribute it for public consumption? And where are we to look for the something to be found in Mantegna's pictures when he has been so unfortunate as to lose it?"

Mr. Wells, naturally enough, broke with the Fabian Society; and at the same time, discovering the inadequacy of his remedy, broke with the whole social order, resigned himself for a time to sheer irritation, and took his revenge upon the world in The New Machiavelli. He devoted his brilliant powers to satirising the whole public life of Great Britain, in the same breath lampooning the public persons with whom he had been personally associated, and defending himself against certain personal charges which had been brought against him.

It was an effective book. It occasioned not a little gossip, excitement, scandal, and even heart-burning. Though the author announced that the persons in the novel were composite characters, not to be taken as likenesses of real persons, and though no doubt there were scenes and conversations which he had invented and incidents which he had transposed, nevertheless in many essentials the story was photographic. Mr. Wells himself was never, like his hero Remington, either at Cambridge or in Parliament, but he came under the same educational, social, and political influences which determined Remington's character and career. Remington's friends, who are exposed in all the intimacy of private life to the public gaze, were once, under other names, the friends of Mr. Wells. No one who has any acquaintance with public personages in London can fail to identify those apostles of social organisation, Mr. Bailey and his wife Altiora. Equally transparent are the young Liberals, Edward and Willie Crampton. If the novelist has caricatured these persons he has seen to it that he has never distorted them out of recognition. The realism with which he describes these and a score of popularly "esteemed" public men is applied also to their womenkind; Isabel is not spared; nor is Margaret, Remington's wife.

Here, then, we have what is at the same time Remington's Apologia for his errors, and his revenge upon the society which decided to discredit him. He presents himself as an "unarmed, discredited man," whose power with the pen cannot be checked; a man "half out of life already" because of the "red blaze that came out of my unguarded nature, and closed my career for me;" a man who "cries out of his heart to the unseen fellowship about him," and to those who "have heard already some crude inaccurate version of our story and why I did not take office, and have formed your partial judgment on me." Remington's reply to the man who urges him to hush up the scandal gives a colour of personal disinterestedness to the story.

"It's our duty to smash now openly in the sight of everyone. I've got that as clear and plain—as prison whitewash. I am convinced that we have got to be public to the uttermost now—I mean it—until every corner of our world knows this story, knows it fully, adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton Dean story and the Carmel story and the Witterslea story, and all the other stories that have kicked man after man out of English public life, the men with active imaginations, the men of strong initiative. To think this tottering, old-woman-ridden Empire should dare to waste a man on such a score!"

But Mr. Wells intends something more than to explain the state of mind which led a distinguished politician and moralist, a married, middle-aged man, to victimise—that is the "worldly" way of looking at it—a beautiful young girl who had fallen in love with his genius. Here we have the life-story and character of Remington portrayed at full length—Remington an individual product of our social environment—Remington in relation to the vast national processes which have been changing England from the "muddle" of the Victorians to the muddle of to-day—a Remington clever enough to see our representative institutions stripped of their hollowness and their cant; quick to pierce through the shell of Liberalism, not perhaps quite to the kernel of it, but to the insincere part of it; quick to see a profound psychological meaning in the Suffragette movement, and to distinguish between the outer bearing of public men and the individuality behind it—the "hinterland." The whole was a brilliant analysis of England in macrocosm and microcosm welded into the life-story of Remington. And his hero is not like one of Mrs. Humphry Ward's puppets, set up to be a great politician. Remington as a thinker is almost a great man; he is a profound analyst of society on its human side; he is a gifted critic of public institutions; even his absurd perversity in trying to invent a constructive, motherhood-endowing Toryism is the perversity of a versatile and clever man whose action is precipitated by bitterness or pique.

But the extraordinary thing about The New Machiavelli is, that this envisaging of England in her social, political, and intellectual life, this acutely and almost diabolically observed crowd of real persons, this minute psychology, this exact history, this elaborate philosophy—all are subservient to the purpose of explaining how it was that Remington was driven into the net of sex, and Isabel was enabled to "darn his socks." Parturiunt montes. Is it thus that Remington will make himself immortal in literature, the twentieth-century Benvenuto Cellini, swaggering, in a self-conscious, twentieth-century way, through the tale of his glorious peccadilloes? Or is it to be a Jonathan Wild, memorable as the hero of a hundred magnificent felonies with which a Fielding or a Wells could glorify a sturdy vagabond? But Remington writes in bitterness. His pen is steeped in the gall of Swift. He feels rancour against Altiora, against the Cramptons, against all the "Pinky-Dinkies" who prescribe morals for a genius erratic in his desires.

The successive mental stages by which Remington emerges had been set forth before in other books. They are here brought together and surveyed in a comprehensive whole. He is anxious to strip off the disguises of human nature, and to expose, in each of the persons arrayed before us, the "self-behind-the-frontage." "In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of Altiora Bailey, and was envied and discussed, praised and depreciated, in the House and in smoking-room groups, you really have as much of a man as usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice." His ideal is the individual who lives and acts in the full light of that "self-behind-the-frontage"—the "hinterland," as he calls him; and his literary method in this book is to expose the emptiness of the shop-window, to cast his satire upon the poor show.

The weakness of his attacks is that the ideal with which he would illuminate his background is shifty, uncertain, ill-realised; being undetermined, the function that is allotted to the human ideal is actually left to chance, to accidental impulse rather than to conscious will—to human frailty rather than to human strength. Hence it is that he declares the rights of sex where its claims are weakest; now applauds the conduct of Remington, now apologises for it; now explains elaborately that his mere sensual side would assert itself, now that sex never appealed to him without an admixture of the ideal; now cries out for discussion and public enlightenment on this subject, and now acknowledges that Remington, who had discussed it for years, acted on impulse, in the dark. How uncertain it all is, how mixed in its motives, how brilliantly bewildering in its conclusions—and yet how clever!

It was probably a passing phase in Mr. Wells' history, an unhappy phase for him, presumably, but inevitable. In the uneasy period of irritation and defiance he lost none of his skill in self-portraiture, in projecting himself upon the canvas of modern life. It was that vein of undefined Romanticism in him, according so ill with the life of "public affairs," that put him out of harmony with himself. Such an ideal as he had formed for himself could never by its nature completely satisfy any but the solitary recluse, and had little to give to man in his social capacity, still less to the man whom he depicted in Marriage, irritated, frustrated, drained of his higher energies by the irritating calls of society. Long before, in A Modern Utopia, he had prescribed for his Samurai rulers a periodical course of solitude and meditation in the desert. In the book which, while I write, is the last of his books—Marriage—he comes back to the same idea. He depicts a hero full of scientific ardour and intellectual ambition who finds that in the social life there is nothing to satisfy his deepest needs, and that only in turning his back on the world of people and flying to commune with God, nature, and himself, in solitude, can he attain the mystical peace he longs for. The social world which becomes an obsession to Trafford, his hero, is made to swarm about him through the inevitable net of marriage—although it is marriage to a fascinating woman whom he still loves. At first he had sacrificed his scientific ideal to the domestic and material needs. He had abandoned research in order to make Marjorie rich and to surround her with luxury and smugness. The comfortable house, the artistic surroundings, the social pleasures, and the ennui of acquaintances reveal themselves to him as frustrations of the life which man in his more glorious capacity seemed destined to live. He sees the impulses under which men and women seek to escape "from the petty, weakly stimulating, competitive motives of low-grade and law-abiding prosperity." Marriage is the social bond which has involved him in this. Marjorie herself has become the feminine embodiment of that urgent life of "getting on," of just "doing," which seeks to trammel, stifle, and kill the spirit and higher intelligence of man. Through marriage the earthy sociality of life had thrust itself upon him, and was killing what was apprehensive, curious, spiritually and intelligently aspiring within him. He rebels. He flies to the wintry wilds of Labrador, and takes Marjorie with him.

There, in a merely fantastic but brilliantly described scene, amid the thrilling dangers of a wild solitude and a grim winter, they discover themselves. They come near to one another in moments of peril, deprivation, and self-sacrifice. He passionately asserts, she passionately agrees, that "we can't do things. We don't bring things off!" ... "The real thing is to get knowledge and express it" ... "This Being—using its eyes, listening, trying to comprehend it. Every good thing in man is that—looking and making pictures, listening and making songs, making philosophies and sciences, trying new powers, bridge and engine, spark and gun. At the bottom of my soul, that." He sees man without "eyes for those greater things, but we've got the promise—the intimation of eyes."

This is not, it is to be feared, a very satisfactory solution for the average man or woman who is suffering either from destiny unrealised or from the milder malady of nerves. The medical or the spiritual adviser who should prescribe a course of Labrador whenever we are physically or spiritually "run down" would be of little use to the majority of us. We see here the monkish side of Mr. Wells' temperament deliberately torturing the social and worldly side of him, the spirit suggesting to the flesh and the devil that they ought to be content with spiritual contemplation. The mystic has the final word in those humorous-passionate conversations in which first and last things are discussed by the man and the woman in the wild—the man and woman, still comparatively young, about to return to a new life in civilisation. But what will they become when they return? What will Marjorie do when the shops once again lie temptingly before her, and when her aunt Plessington's guests once more besiege her, and social life presents itself again in its garish variety? Is this visit to the wild more decisive than marriage itself? Will their brief vision of God, their intellectual and spiritual conversion, make them "live happily ever after?" Mr. Wells, at least, should know that it will not; he will surely be bound to write another novel to show the final stage of Marjorie and Trafford, the renewed conflict, within them and between them, of the world and the spirit. For it is a conflict without end, a conflict which Mr. Wells, as he goes on writing the history of his own most interesting self in relation to his own most interesting environment, must contrive to present to us in each new book that he writes.



III

ARNOLD BENNETT

Mr. Arnold Bennett has often been spoken of as if he were a sort of revised edition of Mr. Wells. In reality the contrast which these two writers present is far more remarkable than the resemblance. The important works of Mr. Wells came first in order of time, and Mr. Bennett would readily admit that he owes much to the other's imaginative pictures of a changing civilisation. He belongs also, like Mr. Wells, to the essentially English tradition of fiction. In spite of an admiration for French literature which has had a refreshing effect upon his style, he has written many of his novels as Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, and Thackeray wrote theirs—out of the abundance of his imagination, from an inordinate eagerness to reproduce human life in all its profusion, in its littleness and its greatness, a colossal whole out of which the reader rather than the artist makes the selection. In his longer books he has adopted the epic rather than the dramatic method of writing fiction. He will often indulge his fancy for insubordinate episodes, so long as they are in some way characteristic. He loves abundance of description—there is scarcely any novelist who is more precise in describing all the minutiae of a place or the physical traits of a person. This sort of profusion is very English; and Mr. Wells, too, is essentially English.

The two men were born at about the same time. They came from families which belonged, broadly speaking, to the same social class. They have both of them written with perfect frankness of the sort of people they have known intimately in their youth. And there, I think, the resemblance ends.

The contrast is far more striking. All the most important of Mr. Wells' books have been written about himself. Mr. Bennett has never written about himself excepting in an early book like The Man from the North, in certain inferior books of his middle period, and when he is deliberately writing his impressions of places, as in his book about America. It is always the personality of Mr. Wells with which Mr. Wells is most concerned, and the world as related to him. The personality of Mr. Bennett is kept in the background. He is an interested observer, and he gives what he has seen or believes that he has seen—he reports faithfully as one who might be held responsible for the actuality of his vision. Men and women, places and things, are all to him curious phenomena which it will be worth his while to note, to try to understand, to record in so far as they are significant.

Mr. Wells has an extraordinary intellectual capacity of interpreting his own impressions, and lighting upon truths by some romantic or instinctive process of his own. Mr. Bennett has a very much harder sense of fact. He understands romance, but he is not himself romantic. His interests are all in the understanding and interpreting of the significant facts of life, and he cares very little for the pleasure of living outside that kind of living which is artistic perception. And yet he has so much practicality and common sense—the sense of fact which in his art stands him in such good stead—that he has even been prepared to sacrifice his art to the main practical necessities of life. At any rate, it is upon this hypothesis that we must explain some of the very poor books which he perpetrated before it became worth his while to protect his reputation—the only other possible explanation being that, as he writes at all times and in all moods, much of his work might be expected to be below his proper level.

But Mr. Bennett is not only extraordinarily versatile in his observations of people, places, books—anything whatsoever that he comes upon—but he has the faculty always of seeing objects as if he saw them for the first time; that is to say, he brings imaginative curiosity to bear upon them. He is not personally distressed, like Mr. Wells, about the evil fate of the world any more than he would be elated by its good fortune. But he is interested. He looks for character, and he finds it. He looks for situation, and he makes it. He can be content with a light comic situation, as in Helen with the High Hand, and the result is admirable. He can present with equal skill profoundly poignant situations, such as occur in Clayhanger and Hilda Lessways. He is aware of the fact that life is a spectacle; and that to make it interesting you must make it vivid, you must show it as something that is intense and passionate. And he is also aware of the fact that the feeling of intensity and passion may be elicited from a sense of the monotonous, the trivial, and the vapid; that tragic effect may be gained by the spectacle of men seeking an ideal which is beyond their powers, or grasping at an ideal which proves unworthy, or indifferent to an ideal which we see to be within their reach.

It may be taken as certain that, with or without the example of Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett must inevitably have been affected by the sense of the changing conditions of modern life, and the passing of the generations from one set of habits to another. For it must be remembered that he was born and brought up in the Potteries in the middle and later Victorian periods; that as a young man he left those provinces, and in course of time found himself engaged in the profession of literature at a safe distance from them. He wrote about all sorts of subjects—and in every sort of style—articles, didactic books, fantasies, novels—but as a good journalist he at length discovered that on one subject he was a specialist, that to his accounts of one part of the world he could supply "local colour"—that part of the world being, of course, the Five Towns of the Potteries. He made this region his own. He adopted it for literary purposes. And in writing Anna of the Five Towns, Tales of the Five Towns, The Grim Smile of the Five Towns, and his more famous later novels he naturally found himself describing the Potteries as they were when he was a young man, but as they no longer are to-day. What was more natural than that, as he passed from the last generation to the present, writing in the present about the remarkably different past, he should become supremely impressed with the very fact of the transition—that fact of changing and growing old which dominates The Old Wives' Tale, and supplies him with his theme in the play of Milestones?

In The Old Wives' Tale he presents a series of pictures which make us realise that there are men and women about us who were brought up in a world so totally unlike ours that we regard it as purely historical. He has brought out this fact in a way that may cause misgivings even to those who are still considered young. He takes us back to the most vivid memories of our childhood. He recalls to us what England was like and what people were like in an age when electric trams were unknown, when bicycles were rare, when the retail trader was a person who could still call his soul his own. He has shown us people born in one world and growing old in another. He has presented to us the fantastic but true panorama of certain persons who were young and idealistic, who became middle-aged and practical, who are now old and acquiescent; of persons who were born mid-Victorians, who became later-Victorians, who to this day survive grotesquely among the moderns—and again young men and women of to-day who themselves will survive to a derelict old age among people as unlike us as we are unlike the heroes of Mrs. Ward Beecher Stowe. No one of us will attain a ripe old age without experiencing three different generations marked by three different sets of habits, sentiments, ideals. Mr. Bennett's subject is the tragi-comedy of growing old.

The author presented his people, and the places in which they lived, in all the minutiae of their and its existence. He combined the realistic modern method with the bitter, ironical, sententious method of Thackeray. There is nothing in the first half of this book which Thackeray would have done better, and Thackeray never illustrated a law of life remorselessly working itself out as Mr. Bennett has done. His mind and his perceptions are at work simultaneously. He is alternately humorous and grim, but is too philosophical, interested, and detached ever to be bitter. That was the world our fathers were born in—he shows it to us—that is what our fathers are among us to this day—and again we have the picture. "You cannot step twice into the same river," said Heraclitus. "You cannot go back to the town you were born in," Mr. Bennett means to say; and his book makes his meaning clear.

Two sisters, Constance and Sophia, are the girls, women, widows whom we see growing up from the 'fifties to the latter part of the first decade of the twentieth century. When we meet them first they are young girls—fifteen and sixteen—"rather like racehorses, quivering with delicate, sensitive, and luxuriant life; exquisite, enchanting proof of the circulation of the blood; innocent, artful, roguish, prim, gushing, ignorant, and miraculously wise"—at an age when "if one is frank, one must admit that one has nothing to learn: one has learnt simply everything in the previous six months." These two young people are unconscious of "the miraculous age which is us." They lived in the Potteries before the Potteries had acquired that big black spot on the map which now dignifies and degrades their existence. They lived in and around the important draper's shop in "The Square," under the wing of their respected parents, the once active citizen, now paralytic, Mr. Baines, and Mrs. Baines, the ruler, the dictator of the household and of the morals of all its members.

In the first stage we see Constance and Sophia subject to this parental rule. They take castor oil when they are bidden. They do not leave the house without the sanction of Mrs. Baines. They must not, needless to say, realise the fact that marriageable young men are real facts. They must pay attention to the shop, preserving a proper distance from the assistants. They must be careful that Maggie, the servant, does not overhear familiar conversations. They must not go into the drawing-room except on Sunday afternoons. They must wait upon the paralytic father with proper punctilio. And they must be quiet and attentive when Mrs. Baines is directing their morals. Then Mr. Baines dies, because Sophia has been looking out of the window at a dashing commercial traveller; and Mr. Bennett soliloquises:

John Baines had belonged to the past, to the age when men really did think of their souls, when orators by phrases could move crowds to fury or to pity, when no one had learnt to hurry, when Demos was only turning in his sleep, when the sole beauty of life resided in its inflexible and slow dignity, when hell really had no bottom and a gilt-clasped Bible really was the secret of England's greatness. Mid-Victorian England lay on that mahogany bed. Ideals had passed away with John Baines. It is thus that ideals die; not in the conventional pageantry of honoured death, but sorrily, ignobly, while one's head is turned.

But the generation of the Baineses does not give place easily; it tries to shut its ears to the knocking at the door, insistently as it may knock in the whimsical, assertive personality of Sophia. The romantic commercial traveller whose fault it was that Mr. Baines died a premature, though, scientifically speaking, a belated death, is the symbol of the new influence which Mrs. Baines is too out-of-date to resist. Sophia runs away with the commercial traveller, makes him marry her, and is translated from "The Square" to Paris. Poor Sophia! She is the victim of being half a generation ahead of her time, a suffragette before it was an honour to be a martyr to the cause. But in Constance the old influences are stronger. She persists like a piece of old furniture which survives the relic-hunters and the broker's men. She marries that trusted servant, Mr. Povey, who has such a head for inventing tickets and labels and sign-boards, who himself outdistances Mr. Baines as railway trains outdistance stage coaches, and as aeroplanes will outdistance motor-cars. The married couple naturally displace Mrs. Baines, and Constance notices her mother shortly after the honeymoon—"Poor dear!" she thought, "I'm afraid she's not what she was." "Incredible that her mother could have aged in less than six weeks! Constance did not allow for the chemistry that had been going on in herself."

And so they go on, till Mr. Povey is "forty next birthday," though, dear innocent soul, he scarcely notices it as we notice it tragically in these days of quick living. And Constance buries her mother, and becomes engrossed in Cyril, her son, and scarcely observes how the atmosphere in the Potteries gets blacker and blacker, and the trains run nearer and more frequently, and the electric trams replace the horse trams, linking up the Five Towns of the "District." And Mr. Povey too gets buried, and Constance's son goes to London, and her hair grows white, and at last—at last Sophia comes back to live with her in the old house in the modern Potteries. And still those two old women are living there together.

I shall not dwell upon the career of Sophia—who has pursued her life in Paris very wisely, shrewdly, circumspectly, not to say commercially, thus showing how honest bourgeois ancestry can triumph over the flightiest of modern temperaments. Suffice it that she is now an aged widow, a contemporary of the Crimean veterans, living to this day in comfortable and old-maidish sobriety in the Potteries, hardly conscious of the fact that aeroplanes are an innovation. It is Mr. Bennett, not the Sophias, who makes us conscious of the strange, portentous progress of evolution; of the lapse of time; the changing mind of man; the desperate love of what has been; the inevitableness of what is to come, of what is to replace us, and put us, too, on the shelf among outworn things.

In Clayhanger and Hilda Lessways, the first two books of a trilogy which, at the time when I write, is still unfinished, Mr. Bennett again presents the process of the generations, but he has given us a more intense dramatic interest, he has singled out a few persons for more significant characterisation; he has focussed his picture better, concentrated the interest, and produced emotional tension. The reason why Pickwick retains its place as the first of Dickens' novels is that it is almost the only book he wrote which had a really satisfactory hero—an individual character. Clayhanger has two such persons—Edwin, and Darius his father, as well as a dozen or more of interesting subordinate characters. There are other things with which Mr. Bennett is concerned in this book beside the transition from youth to old age, from Victorian to Edwardian. But he does not let us forget this transition. "To Edwin, Darius was exactly the same father, and for Darius, Edwin was still aged sixteen. They both of them went on living on the assumption that the world had stood still in those seven years between 1873 and 1880. If they had been asked what had happened during those seven years, they would have answered, 'Oh, nothing particular.'"

Ordinary, humdrum life, an integral part of the national life, enacting by slow, imperceptible changes the processes of the Time-Spirit, still occupies Mr. Bennett's attention. He has again traced for a score of years the lives of a group of people belonging to the risen, well-to-do tradesman class in the latter part of the Victorian era. With the successive cross-sections of life which he draws for us he again makes us look backwards and forwards to the England of yesterday and the England of to-morrow: the England which has been revolutionising its conditions of life once or twice in every generation, and has been giving its persons different food for ideas, different standards to act upon, different habits to conform to or revolt against: people whose parents were nurtured in the sweated atmosphere of factories before the Factory Acts, and whose sons will be the people of 1913. He shows us a whole generation of persons who, living through these prodigious changes and being asked what has happened, reply, "Oh, nothing particular." But though the score of people in the Potteries with whom we are concerned are but individually selected from the swarm that is provincial England, they are none the less intensely individual. Darius Clayhanger, the hero's father, the man who has emerged from the pit, and by sheer obstinacy in work has made himself well off with his printing shop, stands out clear as life with all his idiosyncrasies. Hard, plain-spoken, without conscious ideals, satisfied with the status quo (since the Corn Laws were passed), unelastic, relentless, he is yet capable of bursting out emotionally in a manner that displeases his more guarded son. We have memorable persons in Big James, the foreman; Mr. Shushions, the aged Primitive Methodist; Aunt Clara, the lady whose business in life was tact; Mr. Orgreave, the architect; Janet Orgreave, his daughter; and others who come familiarly in and out.

All of these persons whom I have mentioned, completely different as one is from another, are none the less normal provincial characters. They have a natural place in the Five Towns; their ambition does not stretch out beyond the finite limits of Bursley unless it be to the mild ecstasies of conventional religion or the generous aspiration which accompanies song.

But the hero, Edwin Clayhanger, is something different. In the head of Edwin the boy "a flame burnt that was like an altar-fire." But would the atmosphere of the Potteries be damp enough to quench that flame? Or did that flame burn intensely enough to survive so that his spirit should rise out of the commerce, the routine, the unaspiring neighbourly atmosphere which is the dull clay of life? He longed to be an architect. He did not understand architecture, he was unaware of its finest possibilities, but something in him akin to the art-impulse made him long to be an architect. But his father stamped out that ambition. He entered his father's works, and, however rebellious at heart, was continually submissive to his overmastering will. But once, when the routine was settling down upon him, illumined only a little by vaguely directed reading, his soul was burst out of its environment by a passionate love which grew in a day; which seemed to win success; but was thwarted by the woman who, without a word, incomprehensibly, jilts him.

The years pass on—Mr. Bennett's transitions make us imagine forlorn, almost intolerable passages of years in which the human soul trudges stupidly and wearily towards death, discussing muffins and tea whilst the Cosmos is plotting upheavals for the sole benefit of stupidity in the mass—and Edwin, suffering at his father's hands, triumphing over him in old age, is becoming an ordinary inhabitant of Bursley, working, resting, taking his ease. Sometimes the smouldering flame bursts out in him again, and he would perceive that he had been nothing, achieved nothing, that he had been a mere "spendthrift of time and years." "And there was he, Edwin, eating bacon and eggs opposite his sister in the humdrum dining-room at Bleakridge."

But the flame breaks out once more. Art had had no chance to claim him for its own, and Love had cheated him. But when he discovers Hilda, and Hilda's son, and Hilda's misery—Hilda, "with her passion for Victor Hugo, obliged by circumstances to polish a brass door-plate surreptitiously at night!"-with her, love, passion, pity, intensity of living come back to him.

It is interesting to turn from Clayhanger to the story of Hilda Lessways. This story has not quite the distinctive note which Mr. Bennett struck in the two preceding novels. What we miss is, first of all, the "local colour" which is the author's speciality, most of the scenes being laid in Brighton or London; and second, that detached manner which enabled Mr. Bennett to present his persons as if he were himself indifferent to their fate, with the result that they stand or fall entirely on their own merits. Here we feel that he is a partisan. He has taken up Hilda's case. He is evidently prepared to champion her against all the world. Hence the very femininity of the heroine which he has so cleverly created, to some extent colours the book itself, as if by a kind of sympathy between author and heroine. The perfervid woman has sometimes communicated too much of her fervour to the very language of the author.

But in other respects the book shows an advance in Mr. Bennett's art. For the first time in his life he has resisted the temptation to overwhelm us with the wealth of invention which his fertile mind is busy upon. He has pruned away the unessential details. He has cut away the delightful but irrelevant details which even in The Old Wives' Tale and in Clayhanger threatened to shatter the perspective; and has concentrated on the matter in hand with enormous advantage to the dramatic sharpness and distinctness of his story.

He has made a further gain in intensity by using the story of Clayhanger as a background to the present story. The technical difficulty in all creative literature is a difficulty of language and symbols—the difficulty of so speaking to the reader that he may see moods, moments, situations, concurrences of life and forces of passion in the fine, dry, intense light in which the author has seen them. That is the infinite difficulty of all literature—to find a language and to create an atmosphere which may become familiar to the reader without becoming commonplace. How much do we gain in the reading of Shakespeare by the fact that from the sheer poetry of the thing we have been compelled to read him a score of times! How fully the Greek dramatists understood that to be instantly appreciated they must deal with stories every detail of which was stored with friendly associations for the audience!

Mr. Bennett elicits something of this effect of the marvellous from the familiar by putting the life-story of Hilda Lessways on a foreground behind which lies the already familiar story of Edwin Clayhanger. We remember Clayhanger living in the printing shop in the Potteries; his uncouthness, his shyness, his pertinacity; his desire to be an architect and to live the imaginative life, thwarted by his grim old father; and the manner in which Hilda dawned upon him, entered into his experience in a brief rapture of passion, and disappeared, leaving Clayhanger to grope again with the commonplaces. And in this new story we see the life of the girl, the woman; she, too, groping among the commonplaces, with her heart set upon a wider experience, till a moment comes when her story coincides with and is complementary to that of Clayhanger. The speeches which we heard her make in the earlier story are heard again here, with greater comprehension; the apparently trifling words which fell from the lips of Clayhanger, scarcely heeded, are heard again now, and heard as they sounded to Hilda, grasping after a purpose and a fulfilment of herself.

Mr. Bennett has endeavoured to examine the mind and heart of this woman from the inside. Whether the machinery of the emotions, the will, and the intellect really do work out just like this is a matter harder for a man to decide than for a woman; but to me Mr. Bennett's account seems plausible. What is mainly important is that Hilda, whether she is psychologically true to life or not, is, at any rate, a conceivable person. She is presented as one more example of the spirit too large for its habitation. Cooped up with her mother in a little house in the Five Towns, she was in trouble not the less acute because "the trouble was that she wanted she knew not what." Hilda, maturing, steadfast, idealistic, with a desperate readiness to live through the inferior things of life if she could not now grasp the best, with a vitality which enables her to emerge again and again from tragedy that for most people would be final, is a contrast to her rather futile, fussy, merely experienced mother. Hilda flings herself into the work of a provincial newspaper office with the ardour of her idealism. Here was something she had set her mind on, and the practical quest was a religious passion, tragic in its way because the real result of the work was so paltry and sordid.

What was she? Nothing but a clerk at a commencing salary of fifteen shillings per week! Ah! but she was a priestess! She had a vocation which was unsoiled by the economic excuse. She was a pioneer. No young woman had ever done what she was doing. She was the only girl in the Five Towns who knew shorthand.

And Mr. Bennett succeeds in interesting us in the ambitious, speculative Cannon mainly by reason of the pathetically inadequate objects on which he lavishes the passion of his energies and his ideals—on a newspaper, a corrupt thing—on a boarding-house, a centre of triviality. And Miss Gailey, whose heart is set on her hot-water bottle and her cup of tea, and the easing of her rheumatism, interests us profoundly, because it is such death-in-life which may prove tragically destructive to the ascendant nature of a Hilda.

Mr. Bennett is not afraid of the drab side of life. But he never shows peevishness on the one side nor bloodless romanticism on the other. He sees this drab side, and he sees the passion of life—the aspiring human always trying to be more than it is, or can be, in some desperate, foolish way. This is the tragedy and the hopefulness of tragedy which Mr. Bennett has grasped. To possess a keen faculty of observation by which to present life exactly and realistically, and at the same time to re-imagine these facts so that the vividness, the intensity, the pitiful passion of life are what we mainly remember—to combine these two qualities as Mr. Bennett combines them is to hold a unique position in contemporary literature.



IV

GILBERT CHESTERTON

It has often been pointed out that the intellectuals—the people whose business it is to formulate opinions in Parliament, Press, and Pulpit—are not really expressing public opinion; they are only expressing the opinion of the intellectuals. Perhaps it would be nearer the mark to say that every civilised or semi-civilised human being may be divided into two persons, the one an individual who chooses, walks, eats, feels, and imagines in a private and personal way; the other a sort of official person who registers formal opinions when called upon to do so. The latter corresponds to the "intellectual," and is the dominant element in the souls of the ruling classes; whilst the former—the instinctive, the spontaneous, the common-sense element—dominates the man in the street.

It would not be far wrong to describe Mr. Chesterton's philosophy as a sort of sublimated public opinion minus the opinion of the intellectuals. To get at what I mean I must for the moment ask the reader to think of Mr. Chesterton as an abstraction. Let him conceive an Englishman, unlike any existing Englishman, who has never heard of Darwin or Spencer; who has never been impregnated with the theory of induction or analytical psychology; an Englishman who has never read or heard of Macaulay, Froude, Carlyle, Ruskin, Bagehot, Mill, Seeley, or Mr. Frederic Harrison; who has read none of the poets since Milton; who has never been asked to consider the Reform Bill or the Education Bill, the Oxford Movement or the AEsthetic Movement, Realism or Impressionism, Non-Resistance or the Will to Power, Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Aylmer Maude, the Primrose League or the Labour Party, Mr. Yeats or even Mr. O'Finnigan. Let us imagine that this agreeable abstraction is in the habit of moving about among other abstractions like himself; that he knows a horse when he sees it (even if he cannot ride it); that he is accustomed to hospitable inn-parlours where you may discuss any philosophy so long as it is not a system; that he has a chivalrous admiration for women; that he likes sunshine and adores the moon; that he believes in God, the respectability of wives, ballad poetry, good fellowship, and good wine.

And now, having stripped Mr. Chesterton so that he is no longer even an attenuated ghost of himself, let us re-clothe him and present him decent and as he is. We must imagine this abstracted personage, ignorant and therefore unbiassed, suddenly introduced to all the learned jargon of the day. He still retains his simple views about things out of date, and is called upon to pronounce views upon entirely new matters—aristocracy and democracy, religion and scepticism, art and morality, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. A welter of odd ideas and delirious fanaticisms is suddenly sprung upon his simple consciousness. He finds all the intellectual circles in England working themselves into a fury about ideas, factitious ideas, which positively did not exist for him when he was a happy abstraction. Naturally, in his brief visit to the unabstracted world he has not time to study in detail all the philosophies which have been invented for the purpose of debate. But he goes round from circle to circle, listens to this argument and to that, notices the effect which the various philosophies have upon the characters of their exponents, and himself enters into the fun of debate as if he had never been an abstraction at all. He accepts the terminology which he finds ready made, but of course uses it in his own way—he is obviously unable to take anything for granted like the people who have always been intellectuals. He continually comes across queer verbal usages, and feels bound to declare that what we call free-thinking is not what we call free; that what we call certainties are also what we call uncertain; that aristocrats are unaristocratic; that doubters are dogmatists; and that tradition is an "extension of the franchise." And then the world, having never been out of its own generation, having never been anything so shocking as an abstraction, dismisses Mr. Chesterton with the smiling remark that he is, after all, a brilliant writer of paradoxes.