Here, for a happy moment, there seemed to be something better—almost, in fact, a recrudescence of the Wells of 1910. But that seeming was only seeming. What confused the judgment was the enormous popular success of the book. Because it presented a fifth-rate Englishman in an heroic aspect, because it sentimentalized the whole reaction of the English proletariat to the war, it offered a subtle sort of flattery to other fifth-rate Englishmen, and, _per corollary_, to Americans of corresponding degree, to wit, the second. Thus it made a great pother, and was hymned as a masterpiece in such gazettes as the New York _Times_, as Blasco Ibáñez’s “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” was destined to be hymned three years later. But there was in the book, in point of fact, a great hollowness, and that hollowness presently begat an implosion that disposed of the shell. I daresay many a novel-reader returns, now and then, to “Tono-Bungay,” and even to “Ann Veronica.” But surely only a reader with absolutely nothing else to read would return to “Mr. Britling Sees It Through.” There followed—what? “The Soul of a Bishop,” perhaps the worst novel ever written by a serious novelist since novel-writing began. And then—or perhaps a bit before, or simultaneously—an idiotic religious tract—a tract so utterly feeble and preposterous that even the Scotchman, William Archer, could not stomach it. And then, to make an end, came “Joan and Peter”—and the collapse of Wells was revealed at last in its true proportions.