it is not a single interest, but a woven tapestry of interests; one is drawn on first by this affection and curiosity, and then by that; it is something to return to, and I do not see that we can possibly set any limit to its extent.  The distinctive value of the novel among written works of art is in characterisation, and the charm of a well-conceived character lies, not in knowing its destiny, but in watching its proceedings.  For my own part, I will confess that I find all the novels of Dickens, long as they are, too short for me.  I am sorry they do not flow into one another more than they do.  I wish Micawber and Dick Swiveller and Sairey Gamp turned up again in other novels than their own, just as Shakespeare ran the glorious glow of Falstaff through a group of plays.  But Dickens tried this once when he carried on the Pickwick Club into “Master Humphrey’s Clock.”  That experiment was unsatisfactory, and he did not attempt anything of the sort again.  Following on the days of Dickens, the novel began to contract, to subordinate characterisation to story and description to drama; considerations of a sordid nature, I am told, had to do with that; something about a guinea and a half and six shillings with which we will not concern ourselves—­but I rejoice to see many signs to-day that that phase of narrowing and restriction is over, and that there is every encouragement for a return towards a laxer, more spacious form of novel-writing.  The movement is partly of English origin, a revolt against those more exacting and cramping conceptions of artistic perfection to which I will recur in a moment, and a return to the lax freedom of form, the rambling discursiveness, the right to roam, of the earlier English novel, of “Tristram Shandy” and of “Tom Jones”; and partly it comes from abroad, and derives a stimulus from such bold and original enterprises as that of Monsieur Rolland in his “Jean Christophe.”  Its double origin involves a double nature; for while the English spirit is towards discursiveness and variety, the new French movement is rather towards exhaustiveness.  Mr. Arnold Bennett has experimented in both forms of amplitude.  His superb “Old Wives’ Tale,” wandering from person to person and from scene to scene, is by far the finest “long novel” that has been written in English in the English fashion in this generation, and now in “Clayhanger” and its promised collaterals, he undertakes that complete, minute, abundant presentation of the growth and modification of one or two individual minds, which is the essential characteristic of the Continental movement towards the novel of amplitude.  While the “Old Wives’ Tale” is discursive, “Clayhanger” is exhaustive; he gives us both types of the new movement in perfection.