n _Tono-Bungay_ and other books, he
tells the story of the rapidly evolving world in which his heroes have
grown up; of the ever-spreading suburbs stretching out their tentacles
north and south and east and west, of the mushroom houses which arose
without order or system, of the changing system of education, the
changing ideas towards parents--everything spasmodic, growing,
muddled. Similarly, Mr. E.M. Forster, in _Howard's End_, shows the old
house so dear to the heart of Mrs. Wilcox, as the symbol of permanence
in an unfixed society which is homeless, restless, changing. Even if
we look abroad we shall find something of this same sense of the
transformation in the order of things; in America, Mr. Winston
Churchill has written a series of novels to illustrate the successive
phases in the American character; and in France authors like M. Paul
Bourget and M. Rene Bazin emphasise respectively the change from
aristocracy to democracy, and from the reverence of orthodoxy to the
revolutionary secular spirit.

In a somewhat different way Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Shaw, and Mr.
Granville Barker are affected by the fluidity of their environment. Of
Mr. Galsworthy I shall have something more to say, and need merely
point out for the moment that in _Fraternity_, _Strife_, and
especially _Justice_, the author is not merely indicating but
advocating changes which, instead of being left to accident, are to be
guided in accordance with a definite human purpose. Mr. Shaw is so
minded that he preaches against change wherever he perceives it, and
clamours for it when he perceives it not. Thus in _The Doctor's
Dilemma_ and the Preface to it, finding himself confronted with great
changes in medical science, he denounces medical progress and its
pretensions as a superstition and a fraud. In _Getting Married_, on
the other hand, finding that the public is still often content with
old-fashioned ideas of sex relations and home life, he ridicules "home
life as we understand it," on the ground that it is "no more natural
to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo." I am not accusing him of
any real inconsistency in thus alternating between conservative and
revolutionary dogmas. He would doubtless hold that changes ought to
have been made where there have been none, and that those which have
occurred have not followed the course which he, or men gifted with
similar foresight, would have prescribed.

It may be objected that the influence of change up