[Illustration:  ARNOLD BENNETT.]

Bennett is the author of many works of uneven merit.  Some of these were written merely to strike the popular taste and to sell.  His serious, careful work is seen at its best in his stories of the Five Towns, so called from the small towns of his native Staffordshire.  One of the best of these novels, The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), is a painstaking record of the different temperaments and experiences of two sisters, from their happy childhood to a pathetic, disillusioned old age.  The intimate, homely revelations and the literal fidelity to life in The Old Wives’ Tale give it a high rank among twentieth-century English novels.

Clayhanger (1910) is another strong story of life in the “Five Towns” pottery district of Staffordshire.  Although the hero, Edwin Clayhanger, is not a strong personality, Bennett’s art makes us keenly interested in Edwin’s simple, impressionable nature, in his eagerness for life, and in his experiences as a young dreamer, lover, son, and brother. Hilda Lessways (1911), a companion volume to Clayhanger, but a story of less power, continues the history of the same characters.  Bennett reveals in these novels one of his prime gifts,—­the skill to paint domestic pictures vividly and to invest them with a distinct local atmosphere.  His art has won a signal triumph in arousing interest in simple scenes and average characters.  He can present the romance of the commonplace,—­of gray, dull monotonous, almost negative existence.

He has enlivened the contemporary stage with a few brisk comedies. Milestones was written in collaboration with Edward Knoblauch, an American author.  Its characters, representing three generations, illustrate humorously the truth that what is to-day’s innovation becomes to-morrow’s August convention. The Honeymoon (1911) is a farce of misunderstandings adroitly handled.

Although Bennett has shown great versatility, yet his individual, strong, and vital work is found in the one field where he brings us face to face with the circumscribed, but appealing life of the “Five Towns” district of his youth.

John Galsworthy.—­John Galsworthy was born in Coombe, Surrey, in 1867.  He was graduated from Oxford with an honor degree in law in 1889 and was called to the bar in 1890.  He traveled for a large part of two years, visiting, among other places, Russia, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the Fiji Islands.  On one of these trips he met Joseph Conrad, then a sailor, and they became warm friends.  Galsworthy was twenty-eight when he began to write.

[Illustration:  JOHN GALSWORTHY.]