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THE FUTURE

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out the average may have risen another fifteenyears, unless effective means are found, otherthan obvious physical or mental decay, to makevacancies at the top. Clissold (in his sixtiethyear, be it noted) sees more advantage and lessdisadvantage in this state of affairs than I do.Most men love money and security more, andcreation and construction less, as they get older;and this process begins long before their in-telligent judgement on detail is apparently im-paired. Mr. Wells’s preference for an adultworld over a juvenile sex-ridden world may beright. But the margin between this and amiddle-aged money-ridden world is a narrowone. We are threatened, at the best, with theappalling problem of the able-bodied “retired,”of which Mr. Wells himself gives a sufficientexample in his desperate account of the regulardenizens of the Riviera.

We are living, then, in an unsatisfactory ageof immensely rapid transition in which most,but particularly those in the vanguard, findthemselves and their environment ill-adapted toone another, and are for this reason far lesshappy than their less-sophisticated forbearswere or their yet more-sophisticated descend-ants need be. This diagnosis, applied byMr. Wells to the case of those engaged in thepractical life of action, is essentially the sameas Mr. Edwin Muir ’s, in his deeply interestingvolume of criticism, “Transition,” to the caseof those engaged in the life of art and con-templation. Our foremost writers, according

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