It may be taken as certain that, with or without the example of Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett must inevitably have been affected by the sense of the changing conditions of modern life, and the passing of the generations from one set of habits to another. For it must be remembered that he was born and brought up in the Potteries in the middle and later Victorian periods; that as a young man he left those provinces, and in course of time found himself engaged in the profession of literature at a safe distance from them. He wrote about all sorts of subjects--and in every sort of style--articles, didactic books, fantasies, novels--but as a good journalist he at length discovered that on one subject he was a specialist, that to his accounts of one part of the world he could supply "local colour"--that part of the world being, of course, the Five Towns of the Potteries. He made this region his own. He adopted it for literary purposes. And in writing _Anna of the Five Towns_, _Tales of the Five Towns_, _The Grim Smile of the Five Towns_, and his more famous later novels he naturally found himself describing the Potteries as they were when he was a young man, but as they no longer are to-day. What was more natural than that, as he passed from the last generation to the present, writing in the present about the remarkably different past, he should become supremely impressed with the very fact of the transition--that fact of changing and growing old which dominates _The Old Wives' Tale_, and supplies him with his theme in the play of _Milestones_? In _The Old Wives' Tale_ he presents a series of pictures which make us realise that there are men and women about us who were brought up in a world so totally unlike ours that we regard it as purely historical. He has brought out this fact in a way that may cause misgivings even to those who are still considered young. He takes us back to the most vivid memories of our childhood. He recalls to us what England was like and what people were like in an age when electric trams were unknown, when bicycles were rare, when the retail trader was a person who could still call his soul his own. He has shown us people born in one world and growing old in another. He has presented to us the fantastic but true panorama of certain persons who were young and idealistic, who became middle-aged and practical, who are now old and acquiescent; of persons who were born mid-Victorians, who became later-Victorians, who to this day survive grotesquely among the moderns--and again young men and women of to-day who themselves will survive to a derelict old age among people as unlike us as we are unlike the heroes of Mrs. Ward Beecher Stowe. No one of us will attain a ripe old age without experiencing three different generations marked by three different sets of habits, sentiments, ideals. Mr. Bennett's subject is the tragi-comedy of growing old.