I am willing to maintain that H.G. Wells is second to none as a writer
of romances of the type I have just examined. I am less certain of his
position as a novelist. He brings to his fiction the open-eyed
recognition of realities, the fine analysis of modern conditions, the
lucid consequent thought and the clean, graphic style that mark the
qualities of his other method; he has that "poetic gift, the gift of
the creative and illuminating phrase," which, he has said, "alone
justifies writing"; but he has not the power of creating characters
that stand for some essential type of humanity. On the one hand he is
inclined to idealise the engineer and the scientific researcher, on
the other to satirise and, in effect, to group into one
sloppy-thinking mass every other kind of Englishman, not excepting
philosophers, politicians and social reformers. This broad
generalisation omits any consideration of the merely uneducated, such
as Hoopdriver or Kipps, and the many women he has drawn. But the
former, however sympathetically treated, are certainly not idealised;
and among the latter, the only real creation, in my opinion, is Susan
Ponderevo in _Tono-Bungay_; although there is a possible composite of
various women in the later books that may represent the general
insurgent character of recent young womanhood. But now that I have
made this too definite statement I want to go back over it, touch it
up and smooth it out. For if I have found Mr Wells' character types
too few and too specialised; and as if, with regard to his more or
less idealised males--such as Capes, George Ponderevo, Remington,
Trafford, Stafford--he had modelled and re-modelled them in the effort
to build up one finally estimable figure of masculine ability; there
still remains an enormous gallery of subsidiary portraits, for the
most part faintly caricatured, of men and women who do stand for
something in modern life; portraits that are valuable, interesting and
memorable. Nevertheless, I submit that Mr Wells' novels will not live
by reason of their characterisation.
The desire to write essays in this class of fiction does not seem to
have overcome Wells until the last few years. Before 1909, he had
written all his sociology and all his romances, with the exception of
_The World Set Free_, but only three novels--namely, _The Wheels of
Chance_, _Love and Mr Lewisham_ and _Kipps_; and none of them gives
any indication of the characteristic method of the later work.
The first of the three, published in 1896, is in one respect a
splendid answer to the objection against what has been called the
episodical novel. The story deals only with ten glorious days in the
life of Hoopdriver, a callow assistant in a draper's "emporium" at
Putney. He learnt to ride a bicycle, set out to tour the south coast
for his short summer holiday and rode into romance. One section of the
book is a trifle too hilarious, coming perilously near to farce, but
underlying the steady humour of it all is a perfectly consistent, even
saddening, criticism of the Hoopdriver type. He has imagination
without ability; life is made bearable for him chiefly by the means of
his poor little dreams and poses; he sees himself momentarily in the
part of a detective, a journalist, a South African millionaire, any
assumption to disguise the horrible reality of the draper's assistant;
and yet there is fine stuff in him. (Perhaps the suggested antithesis
is hardly justified!) We leave him at the door of the Putney shop full
of resolution to read, to undertake his own education, in some way, no
doubt, to better himself, as he might have phrased it. But we doubt
the quality of his determination and of the lasting influence of the
"more wonderful desires and ambitions replacing those discrepant
dreams." We have only followed Hoopdriver through a ten-day episode,
but all his story has been told.
We are in quite a different position with regard to Lewisham. The
history of his encounter with love and the world, published in 1900,
covers a period of four or five years, but while we leave him
down-at-heel, with a wife and a mother-in-law dependent upon him, and
the prospect of fatherhood adding to his responsibilities, we are
uncertain whither his career will take him. Lewisham is the first
sketch for the type that was to be elaborated in five subsequent
books. The allurements of his love for Ethel Henderson spoilt his
chances at the science school, but he has the quality that is so
conspicuously lacking in the Hoopdriver-Kipps-Polly succession.
Lewisham had some resolution, undoubted energy, and the beginnings of
that larger vision which was the gift of the later protagonists. But
he is not idealised; he comes nearer to the average of humanity than
the later pictures of his like; although they share with him that
tendency to sudden irascibility, to outbursts of a somewhat petty
temper against the obvious limitations of life--a common tendency
observable in nearly all Mr Wells' dominant male characters. Those few
years of Lewisham's life were so well done, so consistently developed,
that I have regretted the absence of a sequel. Indeed, I still regret
it, although I realise very well that Mr Wells' steady progress in the
conception of his own purpose as a writer has absolutely precluded
any return to an older method. Lewisham was not quite strong enough
to portray the further development of the dominant idea, not a
sufficiently tempered tool for the dissection of the modern world.
I have said little about the story of this fragment of Lewisham's
career; I have not even mentioned that deliciously plausible and able
rogue, Chaffery, the fraudulent medium; but in this essay I am more
concerned to trace the meaning of Mr Wells' books than to criticise or
praise the detail. With regard to the latter, the reader may always
feel so perfectly safe. He need have no doubt that description of
action, of mood, or of place will be vivid and convincing, true to
life and essential to the story. I do not pass this detail by because
I have found it better done in other contemporary writers; I have not;
but because I find a pregnancy and a growing force behind these
minutiæ that is strangely lacking from any other works of fiction in
which I can find any comparison.
There are, however, still two more novels to be disposed of before I
can examine the full expression of Mr Wells' purpose as I find it in
his later books. One of these novels, _Kipps_ (1905), is the next in
chronological order; the other, _The History of Mr Polly_, was
published in 1910, interpolated between _Ann Veronica_ and _The New
Machiavelli_. Both Kipps and Polly began active life in a draper's
shop. The former is explicitly labelled "a simple soul." He is at once
sillier and sharper than Hoopdriver, but, like that "dear fool" (the
phrase is Mr Wells'), Kipps has some very sterling qualities. He had
the good fortune to come into money--I cannot but count it good
fortune in his case--and was just wise enough to avoid a marriage with
Helen Walshingham--"County family. Related to the Earl of
Beauprés"--and if he shirked that match rather from sheer funk than
from any clear realisation of the futility of what he was avoiding, he
did, at least, run away with and marry that very charming little
housemaid, Ann Pornick, whom he had loved in his early boyhood. After
his marriage he lost the greater part of his money, and later
recovered it again; but all these shocks of fortune left him the same
simple soul, untroubled by any urgent problems outside the range of
his personal experience. His brief contact with the dreamer,
Masterman, and his friendship with the capable young
engineer-socialist, Sid Pornick, Ann's brother, only roused Kipps to a
momentary wonder, and his final enunciation of the great question was
representative. "I was thinking just what a Rum Go everything is," he
says. That question, to quote Mr Wells, "never reached the surface of
his mind, it never took to itself substance or form; it looked up
merely as the phantom of a face might look, out of deep waters, and
sank again into nothingness."
Mr Polly is a third variant of the Hoopdriver-Kipps genus. He had more
initiative, although he still presents a problem in inertia, and he is
the only one of the three who had a feeling for literature, and read
persistently, if vagariously. And Mr Polly did at last take his fate
into his own hands, commit arson, desert his wife and wander off, an
"exploratious adventurer," as he might have put it, to discover some
joy and poetry in life after a heroic battle that he funked most
horribly and might have avoided. This may sound rather a criminal
record, and even so I have taken no account of his fraud on the Life
Assurance Company, but no one could ever condemn Mr Polly--or wish him
a happier employment than that he finally achieved partly by luck and
partly by his own effort. He was the sport of the forces that break
out so ungovernably in this haphazard world. As the "high-browed
gentleman living at Highbury" explains: "Nothing can better
demonstrate the collective dullness of our community, the crying need
for a strenuous, intellectual renewal, than the consideration of that
vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained,
and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that
inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great
proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to
the unemployed and the unemployable." And that is the moral we may lay
to heart from the presentation of these three quite lovable and quite
futile draper's assistants. Their stories are told without
didacticism; the method displays at its brightest Mr Wells' intimate
knowledge and understanding of the life and speech of the class
portrayed; the developments are natural and absorbing enough to hold
the interest of the most idle reader; and here and there, perhaps, an
intelligent man or woman may be stirred to realise that he or she is
in part responsible for the futility of a Hoopdriver or a Kipps, or
for the jovial crimes of Mr Polly....
I come now to the six novels which represent most truly the striving,
persistent idealism of the mature Wells. In these books he has come to
the mastery of his own technique--so far as a man may ever master it.
He admits that there remain inexpressible visions, he is apt at times
to be overtaken by his own mannerisms (a fault that in no way affects
the enjoyment or enlightenment of the average reader), but he has
wrought and perfected a delicate instrument of style that is finely
adapted to his purpose. I cannot avoid speaking of "purpose" in
relation to these five books, and yet the word is misleading. I do not
mean by it that Mr Wells has ever sat down to write a novel with the
deliberate intention of converting an honest reader or so. But I do
mean that he has tried very deliberately to express his own attitude
in these books, and that whether or not he was intentionally a
propagandist, he has done his utmost to explain and to glorify that
attitude of his. Perhaps I shrink from that word "purpose" too
sensitively, because it is so naturally associated in the mind with
all that is clumsy and didactic in fiction. The "novel with a
purpose," as the dreadful phrase has it, is a horrible thing, and none
of this five could be so misdescribed. Nevertheless it is very plain
that Mr Wells has deliberately selected his stories and his characters
to illustrate certain points of view. The characters are consistent,
and the story growing out of their influences and reactions is never
distorted in order to score a point for the maintainer of a theory.
But the preliminary selection cannot be overlooked. It has, without
question, been made in each case to illustrate a thesis.
_Ann Veronica_ (1909) opens an aspect of the sex question that has
been amplified in later novels. The chief person in the story
illustrates for us the revolt of young women against the limitations
of a certain, the most representative, type of home discipline. Ann
Veronica was a well-educated young woman with that leaning towards
biological science which seems an almost necessary element in the
make-up of Mr Wells' exemplars of the open mind. She came to an open
quarrel with her father on the question of attending a somewhat
Bohemian fancy-dress ball, and she had the courage and determination
to uphold her declaration of independence. She ran away, came up to
London from her father's suburb, took lodgings and essayed quite
unsuccessfully to make her own living. She failed in this endeavour
because she had not been educated or trained for any of those few and
specialised occupations that women may attempt in modern conditions.
She learned by experience various essentials that had been omitted
from any teaching she had received at home, and ended that phase of
her life by falling in love with Capes, demonstrator at the
Westminster Imperial College, a man who was living apart from his
wife. Ann Veronica's story is the first serious essay in feminism--a
term that takes a much wider meaning in Mr Wells' definition than is
commonly attributed to it. The novel presents the claim of the woman
to free herself from the restrictions that once almost necessarily
limited her sphere of action, restrictions that are ever becoming more
meaningless in a civilisation that has enforced new economic
conditions. But Mr Wells goes far beyond that elementary proposition.
He has tried in _Ann Veronica_--and again with a more delicate probe
in _Marriage_ and _The Passionate Friends_--to touch the hidden thing
that is causing all this surface inflammation. He has analysed and
diagnosed the exposed evil, always it seems with a certain
tentativeness, and we are left to carry on his line of research; many
of the difficulties of the problem are indicated, but no sovereign
specific for the malady.
_Tono-Bungay_ (1909) touches only casually on the sex question. The
involved love affairs of George Ponderevo are less essential than the
career of his uncle, the inventor of the patent medicine that gives a
title to the book. In many ways _Tono-Bungay_ is the best novel that
Mr Wells has given us. It is written in the first person, a narrative
form that afterwards served to convey Mr Wells' interpolated
criticisms of the bodies social and politic in something nearly
approaching the shape of an essay, but in _Tono-Bungay_ there are no
important divagations from the development of the story. The framework
of the book is provided by the life history of the narrator from early
boyhood to middle age, matter interesting enough in itself even if it
had not provided the means for revealing the inwardness of Edward
Ponderevo's character and career. He was not a bad little man, this
plump little chemist; a Lombroso or a Ferri would have found
difficulty in classifying him as a "criminal type," however eager
those investigators might have been to confirm their pet theories.
Ponderevo's wife--the inimitable Aunt Susan--called him "Teddy" and
his nephew endorses the appropriateness of that diminutive; he affirms
that there was a characteristic "teddiness" about Uncle Ponderevo. He
failed as a retail chemist in Wimblehurst. He was not naturally
dishonest, but he had windy ideas about finance, and he was careless
in the matter of certain trust monies. He was "imaginative, erratic,
inconsistent, recklessly inexact," and his imagination led him by way
of a patent medicine to company promoting on the Hooley scale. "Do you
realise the madness of the world that sanctions such a thing?" asks Mr
Wells in the person of the supposed narrator and points that question
on a later page as follows:--"At the climax of his Boom, my uncle at
the most sparing estimate must have possessed in substance and credit
about two million pounds' worth of property to set off against his
vague colossal liabilities, and from first to last he must have had a
controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty millions. This
irrational muddle of a community in which we live gave him that, paid
him at that rate for sitting in a room and scheming and telling it
lies. For he created nothing, he invented nothing, he economised
nothing. I cannot claim that a single one of the great businesses we
organised added any real value to human life at all."
The enormous success and rapid failure of this futile, ambitious
little chemist--a success that is, unhappily, only too conceivable and
probable--are seen against the background of his nephew's life, Mr
Wells has given a greater value and credulity to the legal
criminalities of Ponderevo, by coming at him, as it were, through a
wider angle; just as he achieves all the circumstances of reality in
his romances by his postulation of an average eye-witness. But there
are many threads in George Ponderevo's life that were not immediately
intertwined with the _Tono-Bungay_ career, and his love for Beatrice
Normanby touches in quite another manner on the sex problem opened in
_Ann Veronica_. In both these books the story is the essential thing,
and the attack upon social conditions is relatively indirect. The
general criticism is at times quite explicit, but it is subordinated.
In _The New Machiavelli_ (1910) these relations are nearly reversed.
The detailed exposure of the moving forces that stimulate our
political energies, occupies long sections into which the human
relations of Remington (the form is again that of an autobiography)
hardly enter, except in an occasional conversation to sharpen up a
criticism. This comment on politics (regarded in his own constituency,
Remington says, not as a "great constructive process" but as a "kind
of dog-fight") is the chief theme; subsidiary to it is the comment on
a society that could waste so valuable a life as Remington's for the
sake of a moral convention. Both comments point Mr Wells' expression
of what he calls in this book "the essential antagonism ... in all
human affairs ... between ideas and the established method--that is to
say, between ideas and the rule of thumb." And he adds: "The world I
hate is the rule-of-thumb world; the thing I and my kind exist for
primarily is battle with that, to annoy it, disarrange it, reconstruct
it." This confession is so lucid and characteristic that I cannot
improve upon it, and yet I see that it is a statement likely to arouse
considerable resentment, "Of course we are detestable," Remington
admits in this connection; and in these later, more urgently critical
novels, we recognise a little too clearly that note of protest, almost
of defensive proclamation. And in none of them do we see it more
definitely than in the book now under consideration. In many ways _The
New Machiavelli_ stands apart from the other novels. I find it a
little bitter in places, because the thing condemned appears too small
for such unequivocal condemnation. The following superlative summary
is put into the mouth of a minor character, but I think it is fairly
representative of Remington's later attitude. "But of all the damned
things that ever were damned," says the plain-spoken Britten, "your
damned shirking, temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied,
respectable, make-believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is the
utterly damnedest." As a commentary, I find this exaggerated; and
although it is in the mouth of one who is not presented as a spokesman
for Mr Wells' own opinions, I feel that it comes very near to being a
text for a considerable section of the political criticism; and that
it indicates bias, a departure from normality.
And yet, despite this occasional exhibition of temper, _The New
Machiavelli_ is a most illuminating book. It reveals with
extraordinary clearness the Wells of that period; but it also gives us
a sight of the spirit in him that does not change. All his books,
romances, novels and essays indicate a gradual process of growth; if
we were to apply any label to him, we should inevitably land ourselves
in confusion. He is nothing "in the first place" but a man with an
intense desire to understand life. As he says in this book: "A human
being who is a philosopher in the first place, a teacher in the first
place, or a statesman in the first place, is thereby and
inevitably--though he bring God-like gifts to the pretence--a quack."
But while he may dissociate himself from any clique, and disclaim any
fixed opinion that might earn for him the offensive and fiercely
rejected label, he nevertheless presents to us one unchanging attitude
in these very refusals. "I'm going to get experience for humanity out
of all my talents--and bury nothing," says Remington; and that purpose
is implicit in every book that Wells has written. He is an empiric,
using first this test and then that to try the phenomena of life;
publishing the detail of his experiment and noting certain
deductions. But while he may offer a prescription for certain
symptoms, he gives us to understand that he is only diagnosing a phase
in human development; that he is seeking an ultimate which he never
hopes to find, and that the deductions he draws to-day may be rejected
to-morrow without a shadow of regret. He would be constant, I think,
only in his inconstancy to any criterion of present conditions as
applicable or likely to be applicable to the future; he sees life as a
dynamic thing in process of change and growth. "All the history of
mankind," he writes, "all the history of life has been and will be the
story of something struggling out of the indiscriminated abyss,
struggling to exist and prevail over and comprehend individual
lives--an effect of insidious attraction, an idea of invincible
appeal." And it is for this reason that he is so eager to battle with,
annoy, disarrange and reconstruct that rule-of-thumb world he
censures so steadily; he is fighting the assumption of a static
condition which he knows to be impossible.
And for a moment in _The New Machiavelli_, and again in his next book,
_Marriage_, he has a passing vision of some greater movement of which
we are but the imperfect instruments. He develops and then drops the
idea of a "hinterland," not only to the individual mind but to the
general consciousness. The "permanent reality," he calls it, "which is
never really immediate, which draws continually upon human experience
and influences human action more and more, but which is itself never
the actual player upon the stage. It is the unseen dramatist who never
takes a call." And in another place he writes in the same connection:
" ... the ideas go on--as though we are all no more than little cells
and corpuscles in some great brain beyond our understanding."
We come again to a hint of that explanation at the end of _Marriage_,
published in 1912. The story, reduced to the barest outline, is that
of the relations of Trafford to his wife. It is not complicated by any
sexual temptations or jealousies, but it gradually evolves the
integral problem of the meaning of life.
Trafford, before his engagement to Marjorie Pope, and for a year or
two after his marriage, was engaged in research work. His speciality
was molecular physics and he was a particularly brilliant
investigator. That research, with all the possibilities that it held
of some immense discovery of the laws that govern the constitution of
inorganic and progressively, perhaps, of organic, matter, was
sufficient to engross his mental energies, to give him a sense of
satisfaction in life; but his six hundred pounds a year proved
insufficient to satisfy the demands of Marjorie's claim to enjoyment.
She was not a mere type of the worldly-minded woman. She represents,
indeed, the claim of modern women for a distinctive interest and
employment not less urgent and necessary than the interests and
employments of men. And when she failed, as she plainly must have
failed, to find any such occupation, her sense of beauty and her
justifiable demand for life found an outlet largely in shopping, in
entertaining, in all such ephemeral attractions and amusements as
women in her class may seek and reject. That way of escape, however,
soon raised financial obstructions to Trafford's work. He had to find
a means for increasing his income, and came at last and inevitably to
the necessity for making more money and continually still more. The
road to wealth was opened for him and he took it by sacrificing his
research work, but when the economic problem had been triumphantly
solved, he could not return to his first absorption in the problems
of molecular physics. Life pressed upon him at every moment of the
day, he had been inveigled into a net.
The manner of Trafford's escape from the thing that intrigued him has
been severely criticised. After I had first read the book I too was
inclined to deprecate the device of taking Trafford and Marjorie into
the loneliness of a Labrador winter, in order to set them right with
themselves and give them a clearer vision of life. But I have read
_Marriage_ twice since I formed that premature judgment, and each time
I have found a growing justification for what at first may seem a
somewhat whimsical solution to the difficulties of an essentially
social problem.
But in effect this is the same specific that I upheld in my comment on
the romances; it illustrates the need felt by a certain class of mind
for temporary withdrawal from all the immediate urgencies and calls
of social life; the overwhelming desire to see the movements and
intricacies of human initiative and reactions, from a momentarily
detached standpoint. And Mr Wells has offered us a further commentary
on the difficulties of this abstraction, by withholding any vision
from Trafford until he was finally isolated from Marjorie, and even
from any physical contact with the movement of what we call reality,
by illness and fever. Only then, indeed, did he touch the vital
issues. I find the statement of this ultimate thing, vaguely phrased
in Trafford's semi-delirium, presenting another expression of the
thought quoted from _The New Machiavelli_; the conception of humanity
as an instrument. "Something trying to exist," he says, something
"which isn't substance, doesn't belong to space or time, something
stifled and enclosed, struggling to get through." And later he
repeats: "It struggles to exist, becomes conscious, becomes now
conscious of itself. That is where I come in as a part of it. Above
the beast in me is that--the desire to know better, to
know--beautifully, and to transmit my knowledge. That's all there is
in life for me beyond food and shelter and tidying up. This
Being--opening its eyes, listening, trying to comprehend. Every good
thing in man is that--looking and making pictures, listening and
making songs.... We began with bone-scratching. We're still--near it.
I'm just a part of this beginning--mixed with other things. Every
book, every art, every religion is that, the attempt to understand and
express--mixed with other things."
I have reached something like a climax with this passage; a climax
that I would willingly maintain if it were possible, inasmuch as it
holds a representation of that unchanging influence which I find as an
inspiration and a force behind all H.G. Wells' books. Necessarily
this vital inspiration is, as he says, "mixed with other things"; he
has had to find a means to express it, and our means of expression is
limited not only by our own powers but in a large degree by the
limitations of the audience addressed. Moreover H.G. Wells' art
represents him in that it is a practical art. He is, in an
unspecialised sense, a pragmatist. He comes back from his isolations
to find in this world all the substance and potentialities of beauty
both in outward appearance and in conduct. And he is not content to
vapour of ideals. He recognises that the stuff of admiration and
desire that animates his own being is present throughout humanity.
Only the sight of it is obscured by all those stupidities and
condescensions to rule-of-thumb that he attacks so furiously. Those
are the impediments that he would clear away, and he acknowledges that
they stand between him and his own sight of beauty. He is compelled
always to struggle--and we can see the signs of it in all he
writes--with his own weakness and limitations; criticising himself as
he satirises the thing condemned, but striving without ceasing to
serve the purpose of that which he knows is "struggling to exist."
This, to me, is the spirit of H.G. Wells, and I find it a spirit that
is as admirable as it is human....
_The Passionate Friends_ (1913) is another experiment in exposition.
The very real and fine love of Stafford (the autobiographer in this
case) and Lady Mary Christian is spoiled, made to appear insignificant
and debased, by all the conventions and petty, unoriginal judgments
that go to the making of the rule of our society. The woman had to
make her choice between love in an undignified poverty for which all
her training had unfitted her, and a sterile ease and magnificence
that gave her those opportunities which her temperament and education
demanded. She chose for dignity and opportunity, was tempted to grasp
at love, and thus finally came into a blind alley from which death was
the only escape. It is another picture of the old conflict illustrated
in the persons of Ann Veronica and Marjorie Trafford; the constant
inability that our conditions impose on the desire to love
beautifully. The implicit demand is that for greater freedom for
women, socially and economically. Incidentally we see that the man,
Stafford, does not suffer in the same degree. His splendid love for
Lady Mary is thwarted, but he finds an outlet. It is a new aspect of
escape, by the way, for Stafford's illuminating business of spreading
and collating knowledge is a relief from the scientific research which
was in some form or another the specific of the earlier novels--if we
exclude Remington's political propaganda in _The New Machiavelli_, a
suggested solution that was, at the best, something half-hearted. And
Stafford's escape, and his version of going to the mountain apart--by
way of a sight of the East and of America--bring us back to that
integral theme which I have so insisted upon, even at the risk of
tedious repetition. "I was already beginning to see the great problem
of mankind," writes Stafford, "as indeed nothing other than a
magnification of the little problem of myself, as a problem in escape
from grooves, from preoccupations and suspicions, precautions and
ancient angers.... For all of us, as for each of us, salvation is
that. We have to get away from ourselves to a greater thing, to a
giant's desire and an unending life, ours and yet not our own."
The last novel published at the time I write is _The Wife of Sir Isaac
Harman_ (1914). The same theme is presented, but in other
circumstances. Ellen Sawbridge, when she married, at eighteen, the
founder and proprietor of "The International Bread Shops," was an
ingenuous schoolgirl; and for more than seven years the change from a
relatively independent poverty to the luxuries she could enjoy as the
wife of a man who had not outgrown the Eastern theory with regard to
the position of women, sufficed to keep her reasonably content. Mr
Brumley was the instrument of Fate that seriously disturbed her
satisfaction; but she must have come to much the same crisis, if Mr
Brumley had never existed. Brumley was a writer, but he was not one of
"the really imaginative people, the people with vision, the people who
let themselves go"--I quote the expression of George Wilkins, the
novelist--and Lady Harman never fell very deeply in love with him.
Nevertheless it was through Brumley's interference with her life that
she faced the crux of her position as the closely restricted occupant
of "a harem of one." She never broke out of that cage. One desperate
effort led her, by way of a suffragist demonstration on a post office
window, to a month's freedom in prison; but Sir Isaac and society were
too clever and too strong for her. When she was enlarged from the
solitude of confinement in a cell, she was tricked and bullied into
the resumption of her marital engagements. And presumably she must
have continued to act as the nurse of her now invalid husband for the
rest of her life, suffering the indignities of his abuse and the
restrictions of liberty that the paid attendant may escape by a change
of situation, if release had not come through Sir Isaac's death. By
that time Lady Harman had learnt her lesson. I am distinctly sorry for
Mr Brumley, but I should have been seriously disappointed in Ellen
Harman if she had consented to marry him.
Thus far I have only traced an imperfect outline of what I take to be
the more important motive of the book. But there is a second pattern
hardly less essential--namely, the criticism of the management and, _à
fortiori_, of the conception of principle, in relation to the
International Bread Shops. Arising out of this interwoven theme we
come to some examination of the status of the female employee in
general, and particularly in connection with the question of their
board and lodging outside business hours. But in _The Wife of Sir
Isaac Harman_ the essay manner has been abandoned. Any diversion from
the development of the story is carried out by the expressed opinions
of the characters themselves; and, as a consequence, the two essential
problems are not unduly intruded upon the reader, although for that
very reason they may remain longer in his thoughts. One more comment
should be added, which is that this is the wittiest book that Mr
Wells has yet given us. However serious the motives that give it life,
it must be classed as a comedy....
In concluding this brief review of Mr Wells' novels, I feel that I
must hark back to a passage in _The Passionate Friends_ in order to
indicate a spirit which, if it is not so definitely phrased in this
last book of his, is certainly upheld in the matter of the story. For
it is that spirit which seems to me the thing that should live and be
remembered. Here is one of its more characteristic expressions in the
mouth of Stafford, who writes:
"I know that a growing multitude of men and women outwear the ancient
ways. The bloodstained organised jealousies of religious intolerance,
the delusions of nationality and cult and race, that black hatred
which simple people, and young people and common people cherish
against all that is not in the likeness of themselves cease to be the
undisputed ruling forces of our collective life. We want to emancipate
our lives from this slavery and these stupidities, from dull hatreds
and suspicions.... A spirit ... arises and increases in human affairs,
a spirit that demands freedom and gracious living as our inheritance
too long deferred...."
And surely H.G. Wells has striven to give a freer and more vital
expression to that spirit, working through his own life, than any
other novelist of our day. Indeed I would go further and claim that no
such single and definite inspiration can be found in the works of any
other secular writer. Wells has given to the novel a new criticism
and, to a certain degree, a new form.