Now, Mr. Wells does tamper with truth. He did it, for example, in the case of Ann Veronica. He wanted Ann Veronica to be a nice girl under twenty, and he wanted her, even more, to be unduly awakened to certain physical aspects of sex. It was sentimentality that made him draw her as he did: determination to prove that the girl who loved as he wanted her to love was just as conventional as any one else. You cannot have your cake and eat it too; but the sentimentalist blindly refuses to accept that. Accordingly, we get the unconvincing creature that Mr. Wells wanted to believe existed. Mr. Wells's heroes may not seem to bear out my argument so well as Mr. Galsworthy's. To be sure, Mr. Wells is not so sentimental as Mr. Galsworthy, and he has not, like the author of _The Man of Property_, and _Fraternity_, and _Justice_, one--just one--fixed idea. Mr. Galsworthy always deals with a man who is in love with some other man's wife; and his world is thereby narrowed. Mr. Wells is interested in a good many things, and his politics are not purely philanthropic as most of our novelists' politics are. But Mr. Wells's heroes, even when they are fairly fortunate, are preoccupied with their own notions of sociological duty, even more than they are preoccupied with passion, though their passion is 'special' enough when it comes. Would any one except a Wells hero take a trip to India and come away having seen nothing but the sweat-shops of Bombay? Always the author's sympathy is with the under dog; whether it is Kipps or Mr. Polly living out his long foredoomed existence, or George Ponderevo analyzing Bladesover with diabolic keenness and aching contempt. 'I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable goddesses,' says Ponderevo in a burst of frankness. There you have the Wells hero to the life. And Mr. Bennett's people are only spiritual guttersnipes who are _not_ in love with unimaginable goddesses.
The point is that the guttersnipe is having his turn in fiction: if our American heroes are not guttersnipes themselves, it is their sign of grace to be supremely interested in guttersnipes. In one way or the other, the guttersnipe must have his proper prominence. Of course, there are differences and degrees: a few heroes get no nearer the lower classes than a passionate desire for reform tickets and municipal sanitation. But ordinarily they must go through Ernest Pontifex's state of believing that poor people are not only more important, but in every way nicer than rich people; and few of them go back utterly on that belief, as Ernest did. Perhaps that, more than anything else, marks the change of fashion in men. For gentlemen were always, in their way, benevolent; but formerly they had not achieved the paradox that the object of benevolence is _ex officio_ more interesting than the bestower.