and young women do is to call anything virtuous that they happen to want to do. They have not even the logic of Satanists, perceiving evil and preferring it. The thing that is evil is the thing that makes them suffer; the thing that is good is the thing that pleases them. When free love is convenient, free love, only, is virtuous; marriage becomes virtuous the moment marriage becomes convenient. As you never know when obstacles are going to appear or disappear-as convenience is often in the hands of mere fortuitous fate-there is no test left. You must, I repeat, have blind faith in their temperaments. I do not think this is too hard a saying.

As for the women who match and mate with the men: they do not give us much more hope. They are, to speak plainly, an unlovely lot. You may be as sorry as you like for them, but pity is not praise. Mr. Wells's women are too apt to be selfish and treacherous; Mr. Bennett's opinion is evidently that no woman can be decent unless she is a fool-like Constance, say, in The Old Wives' Tale. (I know there is Alice Challis; but I fancy Alice is only a symbol of what every man wants and never gets.) And look, for a moment, at the women described by the syndicate. They are cheap: hard without being strong; cold without being pure; sentimental without being kind. There is the

sensual type-Madeline Paignton, the aristocratic wanton, or Lily Haden, who cannot be continent for a few weeks, even for the sake of wealth and a husband; there is all the crew of light women among whom the heroes make their humanitarian progress. There is the intellectual (God save the mark!) type: the heroine of Gray Youth, or even Rachel Beaminster, whose mental energy all goes into revolt. If Mr. Walpole. had made the Duchess of Wrexe a human being, in whose reality we could believe, we might have more sympathy with Rachel's spiteful traffickings with the family ne'er-do-well. But we should have to be far sunk in fetishism to believe in the Duch ess; she is a mere Mumbo-Jumbo; and her family seems about as intelligent as the first circles of Dahomey. Compare her, for an instant, with Lady Kew. No, a tyranny like that is an invented tyranny; it has nothing to do with life. The Duchess of Wrexe (to borrow a term from the anthropologists) has no mana at all. Rachel's revolt is absurd; and simply shows up Rachel as a very disagreeable and headstrong person. True, there is always something to make their revolts absurd. They seem not to be dealing with facts at all, these young people; probably because they are all sentimentalists, and for a sentimentalist a delusion is as good as a fact, any day. A wicked giant is, by definition, anything

you happen to be tilting at-even if in real life he is a windmill.

You may say that two facts these characters do often deal with: poverty and the sex instinct. Yes, they are sometimes poor, and have a hard time. But they have just as hard a time when they are not poor. Poverty is not the root of all evil, logically exposed as such, as it so often is in the work of George Gissing. Not one of this group of authors has ever achieved the cumulative, inevitable tragedy of New Grub Street, for example: a far better indictment of some of the ills of the social order than all this modern mouthing. Indeed, not one of them is able to make anything seem inevitable. If they would only let the indictment be pitiless and let it stand; let us draw our own conclusions! And as for poverty, have you noticed that even when these young men are as poor as the hero of Mr. Onions's trilogy, they get over it? They never end in poverty. Yet their grievances are not disposed of when they become rich. By that time, they are worried about something else. They have the complaining habit. Rich or poor, married or unmarried, they are always, one foresees, going to complain. These authors convince one that their Utopia would be a hell on earth. They cannot reason; they cannot even dream convincingly. They are in a state of pitiful intellectual poverty-or, at

least, penuriousness; for, if they have wealth, they certainly do not distribute it.

The sex instinct is, on the whole, their long suit. I do not think there is much more to be said about their treatment of it. They have not painted for us a nobler, or a more romantic, or a more passionate love between man and woman, than have some of their predecessors. I cannot see that these novelists give us anything new in the way of human information -except, perhaps, just one thing.

That one thing can best be described as a new theory-no, not a theory, a kind of Futurist presentment-of human types. There are just two possible things to do with the heroes and heroines of the new school; either to say that, as human beings, they do not exist; or to assume that they do exist and to lament the fact. The kinder, I believe, is to say that they do not exist. It is also the easier conclusion. For they are not consistent with themselves; they pass kaleidoscopically from one state of being to its opposite; as mortals, they are incalculable, and as literary creations they are unconvincing. "I don't believe there's any sich a person," is the natural reply to their presented cases. The authors have not the power of assuring us of the real existence of their characters. Life is not in them. If it is not a fault of vision, then it is a fault of technique. I have spoken of the

complete unreality of the Duchess of Wrexe; but she is no more unreal than Dick Lynneker, or the hero of Mr. Onions's trilogy. You can believe in far viler and wickeder people, if you must; you can believe in Moll Flanders or Carker or Long John Silver. It is not moral but intellectual squeamishness that makes it difficult to accept them. Psychologically speaking, they are freaks in side-shows. Mr. Bennett presents us with a whole gallery of ignoble folk; but one is inclined to believe in some of them, at least. Indeed, one is inclined to believe, thanks to Mr. Bennett, that the Five Towns are almost entirely populated with such (which may be hard on the Five Towns, but that is Mr. Bennett's look-out). The syndicate has not Mr. Bennett's technique.

Yet this is just where the very fact of the syndicate gives one pause. Since there are so many novelists in England doing precisely the same kind of inconsistent, unconvincing, unlovable person, there may well be some genuine type that they are trying to describe. Almost never, it seems to me, do they "get it across"; but there must be people wandering about the English landscape who have given the syndicate the idea. We hardly believe that their portraits are accurate; for their portraits are not psychologically possible. But one comes to believe in prototypes. The syndi