ion in political matters and a
recrudescence of a belief in force and on unreasoned authority, is
already passing away. There are not wanting signs that art, both in
painting and sculpture, and in poetry and novel-writing, is beginning
again to realize its social function, beginning to be impatient of mere
individual emotion, beginning to aim at something bigger, more bound up
with a feeling towards and for the common weal.

Take work like that of Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Masefield or Mr. Arnold
Bennett. Without appraising its merits or demerits we cannot but note
that the social sense is always there, whether it be of a class or of a
whole community. In a play like _Justice_ the writer does not "express"
himself, he does not even merely show the pathos of a single human
being's destiny, he sets before us a much bigger thing--man tragically
caught and torn in the iron hands of a man-made machine, Society itself.
Incarnate Law is the protagonist, and, as it happens, the villain of the
piece. It is a fragment of _Les Miserables_ over again, in a severer and
more restrained technique. An art like this starts, no doubt, from
emotion towards personal happenings--there is nothing else from which it
can start; but, even as it sets sail for wider seas, it is loosed from
personal moorings.

Science has given us back something strangely like a World-Soul, and art
is beginning to feel she must utter our emotion towards it. Such art is
exposed to an inherent and imminent peril. Its very bigness and newness
tends to set up fresh and powerful reactions. Unless, in the process of
creation, these can be inhibited, the artist will be lost in the
reformer, and the play or the novel turn tract. This does not mean that
the artist, if he is strong enough, may not be reformer too, only not at
the moment of creation.

The art of Mr. Arnold Bennett gets its bigness, its collectivity, in
part--from extension over time. Far from seeking after beauty, he almost
goes out to embrace ugliness. He does not spare us even dullness, that
we may get a sense of the long, waste spaces of life, their dreary
reality. We are keenly interested in the loves of hero and heroine, but
all the time something much bigger is going on, generation after
generation rolls by in ceaseless panorama; it is the life not of Edwin
and Hilda, it is the life of the Five Towns. After a vision so big, to
come back to the ordinary individualistic love-story is like looking
through