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 th