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 in _Helen with the
High Hand_, and the result is admirable. He can present with equal
skill profoundly poignant situations, such as occur in _Clayhanger_
and _Hilda 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 of intensity 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 writing _Anna 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 different past,
he should become supremely impressed with the very fact of the
transition--that fact of changing and growing old whi