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I have spoken of the angry and the infuriated.  Fury can be hot or cold.  Of the cold variety is Claudius Clear’s in the British Weekly.  “Extremely clever,” says Claudius Clear.  “There is, however, no sign of any new power.”  But, by way of further praise:  “The episodes are carefully selected and put together with skill, and there are few really dull passages.”  This about the man of whom Maeterlinck has written that he has “the most complete and the most logical imagination of the age.” (I think Claudius Clear may have been under the impression that he was reviewing a two-hundred-and-fifty-guinea prize novel, selected by Messrs. Lang and Shorter.) Further, “He writes always from the point of a B.Sc.”  But the most humorous part of the criticism is this.  After stating that Ponderevo acknowledges himself to be a liar, a swindler, a thief, an adulterer, and a murderer, Claudius Clear then proceeds:  “He is not in the least ashamed of these things.  He explains them away with the utmost facility, and we find him at the age of forty-five, not unhappy, and successfully engaged in problems of aerial navigation” (my italics).  Oh! candid simplicity of soul!  Wells, why did you not bring down the wrath of God, or at least make the adulterer fail in the problems of flight?  In quoting a description of the Frapps, Claudius Clear says:  “I must earnestly apologize for extracting the following passage.”  Why?  As Claudius Clear gets into his third column his fury turns from cold to hot:  “It is impossible for me in these columns to reproduce or to describe the amorous episodes in ‘Tono-Bungay.’  I cannot copy and I cannot summarize the loathsome tale of George Ponderevo’s engagement and marriage and divorce.  Nor can I speak of his intrigue with a typist, and of the orgy of lust described at the close of the book....”  Now, there is not a line in the book that could not be printed in the British Weekly.  There is not a line which fails in that sober decency which is indispensable to the dignity of a masterpiece.  As for George’s engagement and marriage, it is precisely typical of legions such in England and Scotland.  As for the intrigue with a typist, has Claudius Clear never heard of an intrigue with a typist before?  In faithfully and decently describing an intrigue with a typist, has one necessarily written a “Justine”?  And why “orgy of lust”?  Orgy of fiddlestick—­if I am not being irreverent!  The most correct honeymoon is an orgy of lust; and if it isn’t, it ought to be.  But some temperaments find a strange joy in using the word “lust.”  See the infuriating disquisition on “Mrs. Grundy” in “Tono-Bungay.”  The odd thing is, having regard to the thunders of Claudius Clear, that George Ponderevo is decidedly more chaste than nine men out of ten, and than ninety-nine married men out of every hundred.  And the book emanates an austerity and a self-control which are quite conspicuous at the present stage of fiction, and which one would in vain search for amid the veiled concupiscence of at least one author whom Claudius Clear has praised, and, I think, never blamed—­at least on that score.  I leave him to guess the author.