Masters of Prose - H. G. Wells. H. G. Wells
to twenty minutes to read aloud." I can add nothing to that description, and would only take away from it so much as is implied by the statement that I cannot call to mind any one of these stories which is "profoundly illuminating" in the same sense that I would certainly apply the phrase to some of the romances. Jolly and bright they undoubtedly are, but when they are moving, they provide food for wonder rather than for enlightenment....
I cannot leave these romances without a comment on Mr Wells' justification as preacher and prophet. Writing in the midst of the turmoil of war, I am vividly conscious of having had my mind prepared for it by the material I have here so inadequately described. All the misunderstandings, the weaknesses, the noisy, meaningless ambitions, the tepid acceptance of traditional standards, have been exposed by Mr Wells in these fantasies of his. And in The War in the Air, with just such exaggerations as are necessary for a fiction of this kind, he has forecast the conditions which have now overtaken us. We know—or we might know if we had the capacity for any sort of consequent consideration of our conditions—that in a reasonably conducted civilisation no such awful catastrophe as this senseless conflagration could have been possible. No doubt we shall profit by the lesson, but it is one that any individual might have learned for himself from these romances, without paying the fearful price that is now necessary. And because humanity is apt to forget its most drastic punishments, to revert to its original inertia as soon as the smart is healed, I feel that when the worst is over, these books will have a greater value than ever before. I believe that in them may be found just those essentials of detachment and broad vision which might serve to promote a higher and more stable civilisation.
III
THE NOVELS
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