ically on each of these problems.
They arise naturally and inevitably, as a part of human life, in the
course of his story of adventure and love. He does not pretend to
solve the perplexing questions. The hero feels that he is "like a man
floundering in a universe of soap-suds, up and down, east and west."
"I can't stand it. I must get my foot on something solid or--I don't
know what." Behind it all, in its chaos and ugliness, he does not lose
the sense of something other and better, a vague but insistent ideal
cherished by the spirit. "There is something links things for me, a
sunset or so, a mood or so, the high air, something there was in
Marion's form and colour, something I find and lose in Mantegna's
pictures, something in the lines of these boats I make."

There, evidently enough, is something that the artist, the poet even,
wants. It is the mystical need, the desideratum, expressed in terms of
this world's goods--"Marion's form and colour," "Mantegna's pictures,"
the lines of a boat. If there is any solution here, let it be noted
that it is essentially an individual, a personal solution, the
artist's solution of the world-problem in terms of what is personally
significant to individuals. But when applied to men and women in the
mass, how thin and watery this ideal becomes, how unsubstantial and
shadowy, how unsuited to the collective needs of society, which are
practical and material. Every man in his public, social capacity must
necessarily express his ideals in a material and practical form; the
mystical side can only find expression in the private life, in the
personal way which is the way of art and individual intercourse. But
when Mr. Wells became dimly aware of the personal equation in life and
the personal ideal, he, who had already dedicated himself to the
treatment of social problems and men in the mass, attempted, by
mystical contradiction, to identify the private and the public, the
ideal with the material, the free with the bound. To make my meaning
clearer, I will recall again the incident at the Fabian Society. It is
just as if Mr. Wells had gone to that mixed gathering of austere and
flippant socialists, and had said, "We want something to link things
for us; we must remember the things that men cherish most of all, a
sunset or so, a mood or so, the high air. When we are settling the
women's question, we must not forget that Marion cares more about her
form and colour than about her vote; and if w