And then beside this group of men, who, dealing as they constantly are with the most prosaic and intractable material, are yet poets at heart, there appears that other group who, headed perhaps by Mr. Shaw, and kindred in method with Thomas Hardy, are the chief gods of a younger race, as hostile to "sentimentalism" as George Meredith, but without either the power--or the wish--to replace it by the forces of the poetic imagination. Mr. Shaw, whose dramatic work has been the goad, the gadfly of a whole generation, stirring it into thought by the help of a fascinating art, will not, I think, elect to stand upon his novels; though his whole work has deeply affected English novel-writing. But Mr. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett have been during the last ten or fifteen years--vitally different as they are--the leaders of the New Novel--of that fiction which at any given moment is chiefly attracting and stimulating the men and women under forty. There is always a New Novel, and a New Poetry, as there was once, and many times, a New Learning. The New Novel may be Romantic, or Realist, or Argumentative. In our day it appears to be a compound of the last two--at any rate, in the novels of Mr. Wells. Mr. Wells seems to me a journalist of very great powers, of unequal education, and much crudity of mind, who has inadvertently strayed into the literature of imagination. The earlier books were excellent story-telling, though without any Stevensonian distinction; _Kipps_ was almost a masterpiece; _Tono-Bungay_ a piece of admirable fooling, enriched with some real character-creation, a thing extremely rare in Mr. Wells's books; while _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_ is perhaps more likely to live than any other of his novels, because the subject with which it deals comes home so closely to so vast an audience. Mr. Britling, considered as a character, has neither life nor joints. He, like the many other heroes from other Wells novels, whose names one can never recollect, is Mr. Wells himself, talking this time on a supremely interesting topic, and often talking extraordinarily well. There are no more brilliant pages, of their kind, in modern literature than the pages describing Mr. Britling's motor-drive on the night of the declaration of war. They compare with the description of the Thames in _Tono-Bungay_. These, and a few others like them, will no doubt appear among the _morceaux choisis_ of a coming day.