th acting on principle, both determined and
irreconcilable, stubborn and loyal, both betraying human qualities
fundamentally the same. I am not for the moment concerned with the
conclusion drawn by the dramatist, but with the fact that the serious
attention which is given to modern literature and drama is the same
sort of attention as that given to the great social questions of our
time.

2.

To search for hidden unities in the literature of an age is often to
distort facts in the interest of theory. But there may come a
point--and I think the most notable literature of the year preceding
the Coal Strike marks such a point--when certain salient facts emerge
so violently and so repeatedly from the written page that no one but
the blindest can ignore or deny them. If one should take six books
written in that period by six authors who are fairly representative of
contemporary English literature--E.M. Forster, Arnold Bennett, H.G.
Wells, Granville Barker, Bernard Shaw, and John Galsworthy--there
would be found one truth about them so obvious that it has been
remarked by dozens of reviewers. It is that they are concerned with
the same social problems as those which fall under the science of
sociology; that they advocate, criticise, or imply reforms scarcely
less directly than do those for whom social reform is a profession.

But this, I think, is scarcely the most satisfactory way of putting
the matter. The same truth may perhaps be expressed in wider and more
significant terms by saying that the characteristic literature of
to-day is the literature of change. The most vigorous writers are
generally those who respond most to their environment, in the same
sense that to such men everything must be full of suggestion,
interesting, and matter for the interpretative mind; though the
greatest of all are those who nourish themselves at all the sources of
inspiration, in the past and the present, in the seen and the unseen.
The latter are in consequence not so purely representative of their
own special time as are those vigorous, active minds which fill a
secondary place in the world's literature, but bulk largest to their
contemporaries. Shakespeare is not so representative of the
Elizabethans as is Marlowe or Chapman. Probably if a greater number of
Greek plays survived we should find that Sophocles is less
characteristically Athenian than Euripides. And in the same way Mr.
Joseph Conrad is not so representative of the cont