One of the most amusing passages in the book is that in which Mr. Bennett leaves us with a portrait of himself as artist in contrast to Henry James, the writer of “pot-boilers.” It hardly needs saying that in doing this Mr. Bennett is making no extravagant claims for himself, but is merely getting in a cunning retort to some of his “highbrow” critics. The comparison between his own case and that of James refers only to one point, and arises from the fact that James wrote plays with the sole object of making money. On this Mr. Bennett comments: Somebody of realistic temperament ought to have advised James that to write plays with the sole object of making money is a hopeless enterprise. I tried it myself for several years, at the end of which I abandoned the stage for ever. I should not have returned to it, had not Lee Mathews of the Stage Society persuaded me to write a play in the same spirit as I was writing novels. It was entirely due to him that I wrote _Cupid and Commonsense_. Since then I have never written a play except for my own artistic satisfaction. Nor, one feels, did he write even the casual jottings on life and the arts in _Things that Have Interested Me_ for any other reason than that it pleased him to do it. The jottings vary in quality from ephemeral social and political comment to sharply-realised accounts of “things seen,” vivid notes of self-analysis, confessions of the tastes and experiences of an epicure of life with a strong preference for leaving the world better than he found it. Mr. Bennett gives us here a jigsaw portrait of himself. We can reconstruct it from the bits--a man shy and omniscient, simple and ostentatious, Beau Nash from the Five Towns. III MR. CONRAD AT HOME