“They entered the tube station.  In the train they could not talk much.  Lionel kept his brain alert with surmise as to the character of the passengers.  Like Blake, a century before, he found ’marks of weakness, marks of woe,’ on each face there.”  Blake in the tube!  Mr. Masefield will produce a much better novel than “The Street of To-day.”

LECTURES AND STATE PERFORMANCES

[25 May ’11]

Driven by curiosity I went to hear Mr. H.G.  Wells’s lecture last Thursday at the Times Book Club on “The Scope of the Novel.”  Despite the physical conditions of heat, and noise, and an open window exactly behind the lecturer (whose voice thus flowed just as much into a back street as into the ears of his auditors), the affair was a success, and it is to be hoped that the Times Book Club will pursue the enterprise further.  It was indeed a remarkable phenomenon:  a first-class artist speaking the truth about fiction to a crowd of circulating-library subscribers!  Mr. Wells was above all defiant; he contrived to put in some very plain speaking about Thackeray, and he finished by asserting that it was futile for the fashionable public to murmur against the intellectual demands of the best modern fiction—­there was going to be no change unless it might be a change in the direction of the more severe, the more candid, and the more exhaustively curious.

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Of course the lecturer had to vulgarize his messages so as to get them safely into the brain of the audience.  What an audience!  For the first time in my life I saw the “library” public in the mass!  It is a sight to make one think.  My cab had gone up Bond Street, where the fortune-tellers flourish, and their flags wave in the wind, and their painted white hands point alluringly up mysterious staircases.  These fortune-tellers make a tolerable deal of money, and the money they make must come out chiefly of the pockets of well-dressed library subscribers.  Not a doubt but that many of Mr. Wells’s audience were clients of the soothsayers.  A strange multitude!  It appeared to consist of a thousand women and Mr. Bernard Shaw.  Women deemed to be elegant, women certainly deeming themselves to be elegant!  I, being far from the rostrum, had a good view of the backs of their blouses, chemisettes, and bodices.  What an assortment of pretentious and ill-made toilettes!  What disclosures of clumsy hooks-and-eyes and general creased carelessness!  It would not do for me to behold the “library” public in the mass too often!

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