f factories before the Factory Acts, and whose sons will
be the people of 1913. He shows us a whole generation of persons who,
living through these prodigious changes and being asked what has
happened, reply, "Oh, nothing particular." But though the score of
people in the Potteries with whom we are concerned are but
individually selected from the swarm that is provincial England, they
are none the less intensely individual. Darius Clayhanger, the hero's
father, the man who has emerged from the pit, and by sheer obstinacy
in work has made himself well off with his printing shop, stands out
clear as life with all his idiosyncrasies. Hard, plain-spoken, without
conscious ideals, satisfied with the _status quo_ (since the Corn Laws
were passed), unelastic, relentless, he is yet capable of bursting out
emotionally in a manner that displeases his more guarded son. We have
memorable persons in Big James, the foreman; Mr. Shushions, the aged
Primitive Methodist; Aunt Clara, the lady whose business in life was
tact; Mr. Orgreave, the architect; Janet Orgreave, his daughter; and
others who come familiarly in and out.

All of these persons whom I have mentioned, completely different as
one is from another, are none the less normal provincial characters.
They have a natural place in the Five Towns; their ambition does not
stretch out beyond the finite limits of Bursley unless it be to the
mild ecstasies of conventional religion or the generous aspiration
which accompanies song.

But the hero, Edwin Clayhanger, is something different. In the head of
Edwin the boy "a flame burnt that was like an altar-fire." But would
the atmosphere of the Potteries be damp enough to quench that flame?
Or did that flame burn intensely enough to survive so that his spirit
should rise out of the commerce, the routine, the unaspiring
neighbourly atmosphere which is the dull _clay_ of life? He longed to
be an architect. He did not understand architecture, he was unaware of
its finest possibilities, but something in him akin to the art-impulse
made him long to be an architect. But his father stamped out that
ambition. He entered his father's works, and, however rebellious at
heart, was continually submissive to his overmastering will. But once,
when the routine was settling down upon him, illumined only a little
by vaguely directed reading, his soul was burst out of its environment
by a passionate love which grew in a day; which seemed to win success;
b