The Unhappy Novelist Mr. Wells' characters are mere formule for the expression of political ideas. On one great occasion he forgot himself so far as to forget sex and Socialism, with the "If you have tears, prepare t9; resuit that he gave us shed them now," might appro-!
"Mr, Polly," priately be inscribed upon the. of his nearest approach to the creation living character. titles of most novels now issuing from the press. On second thought, perhaps tears are scarce-Indisputably clever work is being ly called for, for we are no longer: produced, but it begins with being encouraged to grieve copiously, fever and ends there. me over the: misfortunes of authentic heroes. These gorgeous gentlemen of action no longer strut for a little hour upon the stage. They have been displaced by immaculate nonentities with an inveterate talent for introspection. The name of an amiable and brilliant ecclesiostic has been popularly associated with gloominess, but the libel, invented by a facetious journalist, appears to be not only undeserved but positively misapplied when we have such a host of dismal novelists so palpably in our midst. The gloom of sex and psycho-analysis seems to have descended upon them all, that is, upon all who have any claim: to distinction. They are forgetting how to be human in desperate attempts to be soulfully scientific. Laughter has left them and "love," shorn of graces and gallantries, has become a matter of temperamental inexactitudes.
Mr. D. H. Lawrence, the most brilliant member of the ultramodern school, sitting down to write the history of a simple, healthy individual, capable of laughing occasionally and quite unscrupulously normal? The thing is preposterous. Mr. Lawrence knows "'ife" far too intimately ta be guilty of any such blunder. He knows very well that preposterous persons like Sairey Gamp, Silas Wegg, Wilkins Micawber, Alfred Jingle, Esq., and the rest never really existed. And even if they had, he could have shown Dickens how to describe them as an artist in search of truth should describe them, and have made the record read beautifully like passages from a text book on neurasthenia.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.