ut was thwarted by the woman who, without a word, incomprehensibly,
jilts him.

The years pass on--Mr. Bennett's transitions make us imagine forlorn,
almost intolerable passages of years in which the human soul trudges
stupidly and wearily towards death, discussing muffins and tea whilst
the Cosmos is plotting upheavals for the sole benefit of stupidity in
the mass--and Edwin, suffering at his father's hands, triumphing over
him in old age, is becoming an ordinary inhabitant of Bursley,
working, resting, taking his ease. Sometimes the smouldering flame
bursts out in him again, and he would perceive that he had been
nothing, achieved nothing, that he had been a mere "spendthrift of
time and years." "And there was he, Edwin, eating bacon and eggs
opposite his sister in the humdrum dining-room at Bleakridge."

But the flame breaks out once more. Art had had no chance to claim him
for its own, and Love had cheated him. But when he discovers Hilda,
and Hilda's son, and Hilda's misery--Hilda, "with her passion for
Victor Hugo, obliged by circumstances to polish a brass door-plate
surreptitiously at night!"-with her, love, passion, pity, intensity of
living come back to him.

It is interesting to turn from _Clayhanger_ to the story of _Hilda
Lessways_. This story has not quite the distinctive note which Mr.
Bennett struck in the two preceding novels. What we miss is, first of
all, the "local colour" which is the author's speciality, most of the
scenes being laid in Brighton or London; and second, that detached
manner which enabled Mr. Bennett to present his persons as if he were
himself indifferent to their fate, with the result that they stand or
fall entirely on their own merits. Here we feel that he is a partisan.
He has taken up Hilda's case. He is evidently prepared to champion her
against all the world. Hence the very femininity of the heroine which
he has so cleverly created, to some extent colours the book itself, as
if by a kind of sympathy between author and heroine. The perfervid
woman has sometimes communicated too much of her fervour to the very
language of the author.

But in other respects the book shows an advance in Mr. Bennett's art.
For the first time in his life he has resisted the temptation to
overwhelm us with the wealth of invention which his fertile mind is
busy upon. He has pruned away the unessential details. He has cut away
the delightful but irrelevant details which even in _The Old Wives'
Tal