II

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 logicfrom necessitymiss 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 needsno ingenious, orinvented, 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 toshow. He has made very fewcharactersin his plays, for the simple reason that he handicaps his persons by treating them asideasrather than aspersons. 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. InCæsar and Cleopatrahe did for once allow a subject to exist forits 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. InMan and Superman, inArms and the Man, and inJohn Bull's Other Island, the hero is in each case nothing more nor less than a new impersonation of Bernard Shaw. (InJohn Bull's Other IslandI 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, inJohn 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 Shaviandramatis personæ, 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 yourmotor-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 toThree Plays by Brieux. Brieux is for him the greatest French dramatist since Molière; and more important because whilst Molière 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.

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 thepropaganda 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 ismuch 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 tobe 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 Greekphilosopher, 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!—romanticzeal 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."

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 formulæ, 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 whichnever 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 beenobservedby 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 manyvarieties 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 uponhim—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 asAnticipations,A Modern Utopia, etc., until he began to realise that that personal method which he had adopted inKippswas 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 inTono-Bungaythat Mr. Wells achieved anunquestionable 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 selectionor 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, underminedby 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 theBladesover 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 anylegitimate 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 eachof 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 individualintercourse. 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 FabianSociety; 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 inThe 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 ofrecognition. 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 distinguishedpolitician 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; heisa 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 aboutThe New Machiavelliis, that this envisaging of England in her social, political, and intellectual life, this acutely and almost diabolically observed crowd ofrealpersons,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 inMarriage, irritated, frustrated, drained of his higher energies by the irritating calls of society. Longbefore, inA 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 itselfupon 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'tdothings. 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 thosehumorous-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.

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 minutiæ of a place or the physical traits of a person. This sort of profusionis 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 likeThe 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 significantfacts 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 inHelen with the High Hand, and the result is admirable. He can present with equal skill profoundly poignant situations, such as occur inClayhangerandHilda 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 ofintensity 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 writingAnna 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 differentpast, he should become supremely impressed with the very fact of the transition—that fact of changing and growing old which dominatesThe Old Wives' Tale, and supplies him with his theme in the play ofMilestones?

InThe Old Wives' Talehe 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 minutiæ 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 thePotteries 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:

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