House-fronts had collapsed in rubble across the road. There is a smell of opened vaults. All the homes are blind. Their eyes have been put out. Many of the buildings are without roofs, and their walls have come down to raw serrations. Slates and tiles have avalanched into the street, or the roof itself is entire, but has dropped sideways over the ruin below as a drunken cap over the dissolute. And so on till we come to the discovery of a corn-chandler’s ledger lying in the mud of the roadway. Only an artist could have made a tradesman’s ledger a symbol of hope and resurrection on a shattered planet as Mr. Tomlinson has done. He picks out from the disordered procession of things treasures that most of us would pass with hardly a glance. His clues to the meaning of the world are all of his own finding. It is this that gives his work the savour and freshness of literature. As for clues to Mr. Tomlinson’s own mind and temper, do we not discover plenty of them in his confessions about books? He is a man who likes to read _The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms_ in bed. Heine and Samuel Butler and Anatole France are among his favourite authors. There is nothing in his work to suggest that he has taken any of them for his models. But there is a vein of rebellious irony in his writing that enables one to realise why his imagination finds in Swift good company. He, too, has felt his heart lacerated, especially in these late days of the world’s corruption. His writing would be bitter, one feels, were it not for the strength of his affections. Humanity and irony contend in his work, and humanity is fortunately the winner. In the result, the world in his books is not permanently a mud-ball, but a star shining in space. Perhaps it is in gratitude for this that we find it possible at last even to forgive him his contemptuous references to Coleridge’s _Table-talk_--that cache of jewels buried in metaphysical cotton-wool. XI THE ALLEGED HOPELESSNESS OF TCHEHOV