atriotism; 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