If we would see how this actual change in the outward and inward order of the world has affected novelists we may turn to Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Wells, or Mr. E.M. Forster. In _Clayhanger_, as in _Old Wives' Tales_, Mr. Bennett traces the progression of the English world from the generation of our grandfathers to our own generation; he shows this change creeping upon us at an accelerated pace, catching the older inhabitants unawares, a visible change in bricks and mortar, in widening streets, in enlarged factories, in the introduction of trams which in due course became electric trams; and a change no less decisive in customs and habits, the older folk marvelling at the new-fangled independence of the young; the whole being nothing less than a revolution which has descended with the sure but imperceptible advance of a glacier, so that within living memory the face and character of England have been altered. In _Milestones_ he has more recently given us another account of the same historic progression. And an exactly similar idea has captured the imagination of Mr. Wells. In _The New Machiavelli_, as in _Tono-Bungay_ and other books, he tells the story of the rapidly evolving world in which his heroes have grown up; of the ever-spreading suburbs stretching out their tentacles north and south and east and west, of the mushroom houses which arose without order or system, of the changing system of education, the changing ideas towards parents--everything spasmodic, growing, muddled. Similarly, Mr. E.M. Forster, in _Howard's End_, shows the old house so dear to the heart of Mrs. Wilcox, as the symbol of permanence in an unfixed society which is homeless, restless, changing. Even if we look abroad we shall find something of this same sense of the transformation in the order of things; in America, Mr. Winston Churchill has written a series of novels to illustrate the successive phases in the American character; and in France authors like M. Paul Bourget and M. René Bazin emphasise respectively the change from aristocracy to democracy, and from the reverence of orthodoxy to the revolutionary secular spirit.