7 best short stories by H. G. Wells. H. G. Wells
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