in the Potteries, hardly
conscious of the fact that aeroplanes are an innovation. It is Mr.
Bennett, not the Sophias, who makes us conscious of the strange,
portentous progress of evolution; of the lapse of time; the changing
mind of man; the desperate love of what has been; the inevitableness
of what is to come, of what is to replace us, and put us, too, on the
shelf among outworn things.

In _Clayhanger_ and _Hilda Lessways_, the first two books of a
trilogy which, at the time when I write, is still unfinished, Mr.
Bennett again presents the process of the generations, but he has
given us a more intense dramatic interest, he has singled out a few
persons for more significant characterisation; he has focussed his
picture better, concentrated the interest, and produced emotional
tension. The reason why _Pickwick_ retains its place as the first of
Dickens' novels is that it is almost the only book he wrote which had
a really satisfactory hero--an individual character. _Clayhanger_ has
two such persons--Edwin, and Darius his father, as well as a dozen or
more of interesting subordinate characters. There are other things
with which Mr. Bennett is concerned in this book beside the transition
from youth to old age, from Victorian to Edwardian. But he does not
let us forget this transition. "To Edwin, Darius was exactly the same
father, and for Darius, Edwin was still aged sixteen. They both of
them went on living on the assumption that the world had stood still
in those seven years between 1873 and 1880. If they had been asked
what had happened during those seven years, they would have answered,
'Oh, nothing particular.'"

Ordinary, humdrum life, an integral part of the national life,
enacting by slow, imperceptible changes the processes of the
Time-Spirit, still occupies Mr. Bennett's attention. He has again
traced for a score of years the lives of a group of people belonging
to the risen, well-to-do tradesman class in the latter part of the
Victorian era. With the successive cross-sections of life which he
draws for us he again makes us look backwards and forwards to the
England of yesterday and the England of to-morrow: the England which
has been revolutionising its conditions of life once or twice in every
generation, and has been giving its persons different food for ideas,
different standards to act upon, different habits to conform to or
revolt against: people whose parents were nurtured in the sweated
atmosphere o