No journalist wielded a more potent pen than he through the dark years of the war. His articles in _Land and Water_ recording the various phases of the conflict, criticizing the conduct of campaigns, explaining their course and forecasting developments drew thousands of readers to sit every week at his feet, and were recognized as the cleverest, most searching, most informing of all the many periodical reviews of the war that were then current. That his prophecies were not always fulfilled meant only that, like all prophets, he was not infallible. His vision, his intimate knowledge of strategy, his mastery of the technique of war were amazing--yet not so amazing when you remember his service in the French Army and that he comes of a race of soldiers. One of his mother’s forbears was an officer in the Irish Brigade that fought for France at Fontenoy, and four of his father’s uncles were among Napoleon’s generals, one of them falling at the head of his charging troops at Waterloo. It were but natural he should derive from such stock not merely a love of things military but that ebullient, overpowering personality which many who come in contact with him find irresistible. As poet, he has written three or four things that will remain immortal in anthologies; as novelist, he has a select niche to himself; “The Girondin” indicates what he might have become as a sheer romantist, but he did not pursue that vein; his books of travel, particularly “The Path to Rome” and “Esto Perpetua,” are unsurpassed in their kind by any living traveler; as historian, essayist, journalist, he ranks with the highest of his contemporaries; nevertheless, you are left with a feeling that the man himself is greater than anything he has done. You feel that he has been deftly modeling a motley miscellany of statuettes when he might have been carving a statue; and the only consolation is that some of the statuettes are infinitely finer than are many statues, and that, anyhow, he has given, and obviously taken delight in the making of them. ARNOLD BENNETT [Illustration: ARNOLD BENNETT] If his critics are inclined to write Arnold Bennett down as a man of great talent instead of as a man of genius, he is himself to blame for that. He has not grown long hair, nor worn eccentric hats and ties, not cultivated anything of the unusual appearance and manner that are vulgarly supposed to denote genius. In his robust, commonsense conception of the literary character, as well as in certain aspects of his work, he has affinities with Anthony Trollope.