eral first-class clubs; Walter Scott reached a terrible
extreme of respectability; he went bankrupt, but later on paid his debts
in full. Yet we never seem quite respectable, perhaps because
respectability is so thin a varnish. Even the unfortunate girls whom we
'entice away from good homes' into the squalor of the arts, do not think
us respectable. For them half the thrill of marrying a novelist consists
in the horror of the family which must receive him; it is like marrying
a quicksand, and the idea is so bitter that a novelist who wears his
hair long might do well to marry a girl who wears hers short. He will
not find her in the bourgeoisie.

The novelist is despised because he produces a commodity not recognised
as 'useful.' There is no definition of usefulness, yet everybody is
clear that the butcher, the railway porter, the stock jobber are useful;
that they fulfil a function necessary for the maintenance of the State.
The pugilist, the dancer, the music hall actor, the novelist, produce
nothing material, while the butcher does. To live, one wants meat, but
not novels. We need not pursue this too far and ask the solid classes to
imagine a world without arts, presumably they could not. It is enough to
point the difference, and to suggest that we are deeply enthralled by
the Puritan tradition which calls pleasure, if not noxious, at any rate
unimportant; the maintenance of life is looked upon as more essential
than the enjoyment thereof, so that many people picture an ideal world
as a spreading cornfield dotted with cities that pay good rents,
connected by railways which pay good dividends. They resemble the
revolutionary, who on the steps of the guillotine said to Lavoisier:
'_La Republique n'a pas besoin de savants._' This is obvious when the
average man (which includes many women) alludes to the personality of
some well-known writer. One he has come to respect: Mr Hall Caine,
because popular report says that his latest novel brought him in about a
hundred thousand pounds, but those such as Mr Arnold Bennett and Mr H.
G. Wells leave strange shadows upon his memory. Of Mr Bennett he says:
'Oh, yes, he writes about the North Country, doesn't he? Or is it the
West Country? Tried one of his books once. I forget its name, and now I
come to think of it, it may have been by somebody else. He must be a
dreary sort of chap, anyhow, sort of methodist.'

Mr H. G. Wells is more clearly pictured: 'Wells? the fellow who writes