e 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