But who, after a few years more, will ever want to turn the restless, ill-written, undigested pages of _The New Machiavelli_ again--or of half a dozen other volumes, marked often by a curious monotony both of plot and character, and a fatal fluency of clever talk? The only thing which can keep journalism alive--journalism, which is born of the moment, serves the moment, and, as a rule, dies with the moment--is--again the Stevensonian secret!--_charm_. Diderot, the prince of journalists, is the great instance of it in literature; the phrase "_sous le charme_" is of his own invention. But Mr. Wells has not a particle of charm, and the reason of the difference is not far to seek. Diderot wrote for a world of friends--"_C'est pour moi et pour mes amis que je lis, que je réfléchis, que j'écris_"--Mr. Wells for a world of enemies or fools, whom he wishes to instruct or show up. _Le Neveu de Rameau_ is a masterpiece of satire; yet there is no ill-nature in it. But the snarl is never very long absent from Mr. Wells's work; the background of it is disagreeable. Hence its complete lack of magic, of charm. And without some touch of these qualities, the _à peu près_ of journalism, of that necessarily hurried and improvised work which is the spendthrift of talent, can never become literature, as it once did--under the golden pen of Denis Diderot. Sainte Beuve said of Stendhal that he was an _excitateur d'idées_. Mr. Wells no doubt deserves the phrase. As an able journalist, a preacher of method, of foresight, and of science, he has much to say that his own time will do well to heed. But the writer among us who has most general affinity with Stendhal, and seems to me more likely to live than Mr. Wells, is Mr. Arnold Bennett. Mr. Bennett's achievement in his three principal books, the _Old Wives' Tale_, _Clayhanger_, and _Hilda Lessways_, has the solidity and relief--the ugliness also!--of Balzac, or of Stendhal; a detachment, moreover, and a coolness, which Mr. Wells lacks. These qualities may well preserve them, if "those to come" find their subject-matter sufficiently interesting. But the _Comédie Humaine_ has a breadth and magnificence of general conception which govern all its details, and Stendhal's work is linked to one of the most significant periods of European history, and reflects its teeming ideas. Mr. Bennett's work seems to many readers to be choked by detail. But a writer of a certain quality may give us as much detail as he pleases--witness the great Russians. Whenever Mr. Bennett succeeds in offering us detail at once so true and so exquisite as the detail which paints the household of Lissy-Gory in _War and Peace_, or the visit of Dolly to Anna and Wronsky in _Anna Karénin_, or the nursing of the dying Nicolas by Kitty and Levin, he will have justified his method--with all its _longueurs_. Has he justified it yet?