Mr. Bennett’s chase of the superlative is not confined to the arts. He demands superlative qualities even in barbers. He has submitted his head to barbers in many of the countries of Europe, and he gives the first prize to the Italians. “Italian barbers,” he declares, “are greater than French, both in quality and in numbers.” At the same time, taking barbers not in nations but as individuals, he tells us: “The finest artist I know or have known is nevertheless in Paris. His life has the austerity of a monk’s.” Judging them by nations, he gives Denmark a “highly commended”: I like Denmark because there some of the barbers’ shops have a thin ascending jet of water whose summit just caresses the bent chin, which, after shaving, is thus laved without either the repugnant British sponge or the clumsy splashing practised in France and Italy. He knows about it all: he knows; he knows. And, knowing so much, he is in all the better position to censure a certain British barber who parted his hair on the wrong side: When he came back he parted my hair on the wrong side--sure sign of an inefficient barber. He had been barbering for probably twenty years and had not learnt that a barber ought to notice the disposition of a customer’s hair before touching it. He was incapable, but not a bad sort. And Mr. Bennett, even though he is perilously near being a teetotaller, can discourse to you as learnedly on drinks as on ways of getting your hair cut. “Not many men,” he says, “can talk intelligently about drink, but far more can talk intelligently about drink than about food.” He himself is one of the number, as witness: There was only one wine at that dinner, Bollinger, 1911, a wine that will soon be extinct. It was perfect, as perfect as the cigars.... We decided that no champagne could beat it, even if any could equal it, and I once again abandoned the belief, put into me by certain experts, that the finest 1911 champagnes were Krug and Duc de Montebello. One of the especial charms of Mr. Bennett as a writer is that he talks about painters and barbers, about champagne and short stories, in exactly the same tone and with the same seriousness, and measures them, so far as one can see, by the same standard. Indeed, he discusses epic poetry in terms of food. All great epics are full of meat and are juicy side-dishes, if only people will refrain from taking them as seriously as porridge. _Paradise Lost_ is a whole picnic menu, and its fragments make first-rate light reading. To write like this is to give effect of paradox, even when one is talking common sense. It is clear that Mr. Bennett does it deliberately. He does it as an efficient artist, not as a bungler. He fishes for our interest with a conscious _gaucherie_ of phrase, as when he ends his reference to the novels of Henry James with the sentence: “They lack ecstasy, guts.”