Whether the reading public can discern that undying flame in the choking smoke of books written for money and not for love, is another question. Every year more novels are published; but when one considers the novelists of the past, Thackeray's continual flow of sugary claptrap, the incapacity of Dickens to conceive beauty, the almost unrelieved, stagey solemnity of Walter Scott, the novelist of to-day is inclined to thank God that he is not as other men. Those old writers trod our paths for us, but they walked blindfold; let us recognise their splendid qualities, their feeling for atmosphere, their knowledge of men, but we find more that is honest and hopeful in a single page of _Tono Bungay_ than in all the great Victorians put together. Yes, we are arrogant; why not? Why should it be natural to us to see our faults and not our talents? We are held in contempt, but such was the fate of every prophet; they make us into mummers and we learn mummery, but Balzac and Turgenev rise from their own dust. We are not safe people, or quiet people; not tame rabbits in a hutch, nor even romantic rogues: most of us are no more romantic than jockeys. It is, perhaps, because we are not safe (and are we any less safe than company promoters?) that we are disliked. We are disliked, as Stendhal says, because all differences create hatred; because by showing it its face in the glass we tend to disrupt society, to exhibit to its shocked eyes what is inane in its political constitution, barbarous in its moral code. We are queer people, nasty people, but we are neither nastier nor queerer than our fellows. We are merely more shameless and exhibit what they hide. We have got outside, and we hate being outside; we should so much like to enlist under the modern standard, the silk hat, and yet we are arrogant. Doctors, judges, bishops, merchants, think little of us; we regret it and rejoice in it. We are unhappy and exalted adventurers in the frozen fields of human thought. We are the people who make the 'footprints on the sands of time.' Later on, the bourgeoisie will tread in them. Who is the Man? I And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot. A gloomy saying, but one which applies to men as well as to empires, and to none, perhaps, more than to those men who stand in the vanguard of literature. Of very few writers, save those who were so fortunate as to be carried away by death in the plenitude of their powers (unless, like Mr Thomas Hardy, they drew back from the battle of letters) can it be said that the works of their later years were equal to those of their maturity. The great man has his heir in the world, one who impatiently waits for his shoes and is assured that he will fill them. It is well so, for shoes must be filled, and it is good to know the claimants.