[_4 Mar. '09_]
Wells! I have heard that significant monosyllable pronounced in various
European countries, and with various bizarre accents. And always there was
admiration, passionate or astonished, in the tone. But the occasion of its
utterance which remains historic in my mind was in England. I was, indeed,
in Frank Richardson's Bayswater. "Wells?" exclaimed a smart, positive
little woman--one of those creatures that have settled every question once
and for all beyond reopening, "Wells? No! I draw the line at Wells. He
stirs up the dregs. I don't mind the froth, but dregs I--will--not have!"
And silence reigned as we stared at the reputation of Wells lying dead on
the carpet. When, with the thrill of emotion that a great work
communicates, I finished reading "Tono-Bungay," I thought of the smart
little woman in the Bayswater drawing-room. I was filled with a holy joy
because Wells had stirred up the dregs again, and more violently than
ever. I rapturously reflected, "How angry this will make them!" "Them"
being the whole innumerable tribe of persons, inane or chumpish (this
adjective I give to the world), who don't mind froth but won't have dregs.
Human nature--you get it pretty complete in "Tono-Bungay," the entire
tableau! If you don't like the spectacle of man whole, if you are afraid
of humanity, if humanity isn't good enough for you, then you had better
look out for squalls in the perusal of "Tono-Bungay." For me, human nature
is good enough. I love to bathe deep in it. And of "Tono-Bungay" I will
say, with solemn heartiness: "By God! This is a book!"
* * * * *
You will have heard that it is the history of a patent medicine--the
nostrum of the title. But the rise and fall of Tono-Bungay and its
inventor make only a small part of the book. It is rather the history of
the collision of the soul of George Ponderevo (narrator, and nephew of the
medicine-man) with his epoch. It is the arraignment of a whole epoch at
the bar of the conscience of a man who is intellectually honest and
powerfully intellectual. George Ponderevo transgresses most of the current
codes, but he also shatters them. The entire system of sanctions tumbles
down with a clatter like the fall of a corrugated iron church. I do not
know what is left standing, unless it be George Ponderevo. I would not
call him a lovable, but he is an admirable, man. He is too ruthless, rude,
and bitter to be anything but solitary. His harshness is his fault, his
one real fault; and his harshness also marks the point where his attitude
towards his environment becomes unscientific. The savagery of his
description of the family of Frapp, the little Nonconformist baker, and of
the tea-drinkers in the housekeeper's room at Bladesover, somewhat impairs
even the astounding force of this, George's first and only novel--not
because he exaggerates the offensiveness of the phenomena, but because he
unscientifically fails to perceive that these people are just as deserving
of compassion as he is himself. He seems to think that, in their deafness
to the call of the noble in life, these people are guilty of a crime;
whereas they are only guilty of a misfortune. The one other slip that
George Ponderevo has made is a slight yielding to the temptation of
caricature, out of place in a realistic book. Thus he names a half-penny
paper, "The Daily Decorator," and a journalistic peer, "Lord Boom." Yet
the few lines in which he hints at the tactics and the psychology of his
Lord Boom are masterly. So much for the narrator, whose "I" writes the
book. I assume that Wells purposely left these matters uncorrected, as
being essential to the completeness of George's self-revelation.
* * * * *
I do not think that any novelist ever more audaciously tried, or failed
with more honour, to render in the limits of one book the enormous and
confusing complexity of a nation's racial existence. The measure of
success attained is marvellous. Complete success was, of course,
impossible. But, in the terrific rout, Ponderevo never touches a problem
save to grip it firmly. He leaves nothing alone, and everything is
handled--handled! His fine detachment, and his sublime common sense, never
desert him in the hour when he judges. Naturally his chief weapon in the
collision is just common sense; it is at the impact of mere common sense
that the current system crumbles. It is simply unanswerable common sense
which will infuriate those who do not like the book. When common sense
rises to the lyric, as it does in the latter half of the tale, you have
something formidable. Here Wells has united the daily verifiable actualism
of novels like "Love and Mr. Lewisham" and "Kipps," with the large manner
of the paramount synthetic scenes in (what general usage compels me to
term) his "scientific romances." In the scientific romance he achieved, by
means of parables (I employ the word roughly) a criticism of tendencies
and institutions which is on the plane of epic poetry. For example, the
criticism of specialization in "The First Men in the Moon," the mighty
ridicule of the institution of sovereignty in "When the Sleeper Wakes,"
and the exquisite blighting of human narrow-mindedness in "The Country of
the Blind"--this last one of the radiant gems of contemporary literature,
and printed in the _Strand Magazine_! In "Tono-Bungay" he has achieved the
same feat, magnified by ten--or a hundred, without the aid of symbolic
artifice. I have used the word "epic," and I insist on it. There are
passages toward the close of the book which may fitly be compared with the
lyrical freedoms of no matter what epic, and which display an
unsurpassable dexterity of hand. Such is the scene in which George
deflects his flying-machine so as to avoid Beatrice and her horse by
sweeping over them. A new thrill, there, in the sexual vibrations! One
thinks of it afterwards. And yet such flashes are lost when one
contemplates the steady shining of the whole. "Tono-Bungay," to my mind,
marks the junction of the two paths which the variety of Wells's gift has
enabled him to follow simultaneously, and, at the same time, it is his
most distinguished and most powerful book.
* * * * *
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.