'Samurai,' or lay priests of ascetic habits of life, devoted to the furtherance of the general mundane interests of humanity, Mr Wells candidly admits his indebtedness to Plato. But, as his training in history has not been so thorough as his training in science, he does not seem to know how often the idea of the guardians in the 'Republic' has been acted on, and how often it has been proved impracticable. The story of every famous monastic order shows what too rigid and complete an organisation of the moral and spiritual energies of any age inevitably ends in. The stronger, the more efficient the machinery of regimentation, the sooner does a sort of fossilisation, if not a sort of decay, set in.

Human nature cannot continuously be run into moulds however fine. It is a plant which grows, and it grows strongest when it grows freely. No doubt there is existing in the world at the present day a scattered body of fine spirits in various walks of life. As they have grown up in an age of liberty, struggle, and incitement it is possible that they are, on the whole, more enlightened, more capable, and more numerous than were the men who gathered about St Francis of Assisi and St Louis of France. So long as present conditions obtain, so long will this body of fine spirits continue to grow in number, in virtue, and in power. The very difficulties of their position are a source of strength. There is no need for them to construct in haste some system of material organisation which would lift them above their fellowcreatures and afterwards impede the free development of soul of their successors. They are united already in an ideal communion. Though, for the most part, they dwell in loneliness, far away from each other, their minds breathe the same spiritual air, and, soaring above their earthly surroundings, assemble and converse in the same ethereal altitudes. Ah, Mr Wells, it is not in revolutions, by Act of Parliament, or by main force, that the spirit of man grows in beauty, wisdom, and holiness! Growth is a tardy thing, and commonly that which grows most slowly lasts the longest.

Happily, Mr Wells is a man of varying moods. On the one hand, he is the artificial creature of an education based on abstract science, to whose cold, unmoved intelligence the life of humanity is a colourless spectacle

which interests him as a kind of problem merely by reason of its possible developments.

'At times (he says) I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. (The War of the Worlds,' p. 46.)

This is the mood in which he inclines to become a meddlesome, hasty, impatient fanatic, with an aggressive creed of Calvinistic socialism in which there is neither help and pity for the weak, nor scope and liberty for the strong.

On the other hand, there is in him a child of nature who is as little concerned as Charles Dickens was with he frigid, logical, scientific study of mankind. In this mood he is a fine novelist, the idiosyncrasy of whose genius resides in the power of quick and winning sympathy with which he irradiates every petty, commonplace detail in the life of the lower-middle classes. Far from despising those whom the stern socialists of the vegetarian school account dull and base, he exerts all the might of his imagination in an endeavour to exalt the humble and put down the mighty. Like Dickens, with whom he has much more in common than Gissing had, he shows a happier touch in revealing the merits of the meek and lowly than in exposing the failings of the rich and noble. Vivid as is the gift for satire which he exhibits in other directions, he cannot get a scantling of truth and sharpness into his caricatures of overbearing village squires and supercilious ladies of the manor. how fresh and clear, on the other hand, is the picture of the poor rustic scholar in 'Love and Mr Lewisham'! How tender the humour, and how light and telling the touch with which the story of his struggle between love and ambition is depicted! It is, we think, the cheeriest biographical novel in recent English literature, and the most interesting. Without any of the cumbrous apparatus employed by the writers of the psychological school, Mr Wells succeeds in conveying a very definite impression of the vacillations of mind of the younger generation of the English middle classes between 1890 and 1895.

But

Probably 'Love and Mr Lewisham' is not so popular a novel as 'Kipps,' but to our mind it is the more finished

A

work. It is more of a piece, a tissue of exquisite realism in which the actual colours of life are subdued by being blended. The first part of 'Kipps,' however, is better than anything else which Mr Wells has written. Kipps himself strikes us as one of the most life-like personages in modern fiction. Few of even the best of our novelists of the younger generation are able to create a character of this kind, which lives and moves with an energy of its own in the memory of the reader. In regard to the conduct of the action, Mr Wells is less fortunate. striking, original plot which does not exceed the bounds of verisimilitude is as rare a thing in modern fiction as is a striking, original character. The touch of the magic wand which lifts Kipps from the position of a draper's assistant to the rank of a man of wealth and leisure, changes the story of his struggles into the only kind of fairy-tale which does not entertain us. The narrative loses its close relation to life just at that point at which the relation becomes very interesting. And what makes the use of this primitive machinery for effecting a revolution in the plot especially irritating is the fact that it is quite unnecessary. In the precarious existence of the drifting part of our lower-middle classes there is sufficient of the genuine stuff of romance to enable a writer with Mr Wells' gifts to make a novel of manners dealing with that existence as full, if so he wished, of hazard, variety, and sudden change as is an ordinary novel of adventure.

At present, we are afraid, Mr Wells wishes only to make his novels the vehicle for the exposition of certain socialistic theories. It is a great pity that a novelist with so lively a sense of the picturesque, so impressive an imagination, and so gracious a power of sympathetic insight, should have been drawn into a frothy movement of enlightenment in which his natural genius is dwarfed and distorted. We do not think that he will become the 'Luther of Socialism,' of whom he speaks in 'Love and Mr Lewisham.' He lacks the soul of iron and the colourblindness of the systematiser. The stream of his feelings does not run in the same direction as that in which the current of his thoughts has, unhappily, been turned. Hence his continual alterations of opinion. His polemical works are written with a view to convincing himself. But he cannot make up his mind. He is not, like Mr

G. B. Shaw, a gay and curious sceptic by nature, who has taken up socialism as the latest and most perverse form of intellectual dilettantism. Mr Wells is in earnest, but he is not certain what he is in earnest about. He wants to reduce everything into some formula which he can swear by; but whenever he rises into the cold, grey world of misty abstractions in which the makers of rigid systems dwell, he is enticed down to the warm, green earth by the sounds, the stir, the hues, and the fulness of real life. So he vacillates in a strange, spiritual unrest; being, on the one hand, an anarchist, who would destroy, out of wild, personal discontent, a civilisation on which rests everything that he loves and admires; and, on the other, a troubled, anxious, questioning spirit, seeking vainly amid the shows of time for the eternal foundations of religious faith.

Postscript.-Since the above article was written, Mr Wells has made, in New Worlds for Old,' a strange attempt to mitigate the feeling of uneasiness produced among the more sober-minded socialists by the 'glorious anarchism' of 'In the Days of the Comet.' This is the manner in which he now tries to win over men of the stamp of Mr Sidney Webb:

...

"That Anarchist world, I admit, is our dream; but the way to that is through education and discipline and law. Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism. Socialism is the school-room of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make men free (p. 257).

Having thus confused the extreme form of coercion with the extreme form of licence, Mr Wells goes on to confound all legitimate and practical matters of constructive politics with illegitimate and impracticable theories of socialism. This, of course, is the method of the Fabian Society. In our judgment, however, the achievements and traditions and spirit of a Christian people, with an incomparable experience in the working of free institutions, afford a surer and a larger base for all real social reforms than the fallacious and destructive hypotheses of collective ownership of property and bureaucratic tyranny on which Mr Wells founds his vision of 'a glorious anarchism.'

Art. X.-A GENRE PAINTER AND HIS CRITICS.

Life and Works of Vittorio Carpaccio. By the late Prof. Gustav Ludwig and Prof. Pompeo Molmenti. Translated by R. H. Hobart Cust. With numerous illustrations in photogravure and half-tone. London: Murray, 1907.

THAT there are artists' painters and poets' painters is often acknowledged. It is only fair, seeing at how many points his activities touch on art, that the archivist too should be rewarded by having his special painter. True it is that to some extent the archivist has made most of the old masters more or less his own, has at times obtruded his own special scale of values where the artist's would be found more commensurate; but still it is right that here and there an artist be handed over body and soul to the archivist for dissection. An artist preeminently fitted for this purpose is Carpaccio, and he found in the late Dr Ludwig precisely the archivist to do him justice. It is true that, half a century ago, he fell, by some odd mistake, into the hands of a poet and dreamer; but Ruskin had so great a capacity for subjective vision, he saw so clearly through Carpaccio to his own personal predilections, his own emotional habits and prejudices, that Carpaccio remained practically unaffected by his employment as a medium. Ruskin in his study revealed to the world much that was of interest about himselfhis intransigent Protestantism, his odd sincerity, his sensibility, his tenderness, and a thousand other quaint or endearing characteristics-but they are, it so happens, characteristics of Ruskin and not of Carpaccio.

By some odd twist in his nature, passing by the many great Italian artists in whom a constant religious exaltation and a deep ethical purpose might indeed be discovered, he pitched on two minor artists, Luini and Carpaccio, and expended on them the wealth of his emotional nature. Of these artists, Luini may perhaps have been religious in a rather mawkish and trivial manner, but Carpaccio was, at least so far as he reveals himself in his art, singularly devoid of religious, or indeed of any rarefied or spiritual imagination. If proof were wanted of this, which stares the impartial observer in the