njoys the
high honour of having been selected from among fifteen hundred, to be
made up of identical entities. Indeed, all must be contrasting persons:
if two of them were alike, one would be worthless. And so each one has
his devil to exorcise and his guardian-angel to watch over him. They
must, each one of them, beware of exploiting themselves overmuch of
becoming dull as they exhaust their own history of being cold if they
draw too thin a strand of temperament across the object which they
illumine. But these dangers are only the accidents of a dangerous trade,
where a man hazards his soul and may see it grow sick. If we wish to
measure these dangers, we must then analyse the men one by one, and it
will serve us best to divide them into three groups: self-exploiters,
mirror-bearers, and commentators. These are not exact divisions; they
overlap on one another; one man denies by one book what he affirms by a
second. But, in a very rough way these divisions will serve: hesitations
and contradictions indicate, indeed better than achievement, the
tempestuous course of promising youth.

III

Though, broadly speaking, the seven young men are profoundly interested
in themselves, there are four that attach especial importance to the
life which has made them what they are. Messrs Cannan, Walpole,
Beresford, and Lawrence, capable though they be of standing outside
themselves, are, without much doubt, happier when they stand inside. I
do not know in extreme detail where they were born or what they
suffered, but it demands no great sagacity to reconstruct, for instance,
Mr Walpole as a man who went to Cambridge, taught in a school, and later
wrote books; likewise Mr Beresford, as one who struggled up against
poverty and physical infirmity into a place in the sunshine of letters;
Mr Cannan is still more emphatically interested in the reactions of his
own harsh and sensitive temperament, while Mr Lawrence, a little more
puzzling, is very much the lover of life, telling us tales of his
mistress. This is not, perhaps, because they take these facts that lie
nearest to their hand as the argument of their play. Each one of them
has shown by some excursion that he was capable of jerking the earth off
its axis, the axis being, with him as with all of us, his own
personality. Thus Mr Cannan, in _Peter Homunculus_, presents in
Meredithian wise, a picture of the development of a very young man, a
rather romantic though metallically brilli