Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/126

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the sort of woman that many of us get on with, well enough, so long as we believe there is no other sort.

I have been describing Mr. Wells's imagination, moving with perfect freedom in the group of his works which he calls "fantastic romances." The relation between the romances and the novels of social life might be suggested by comparing Dr. Moreau with Stratton in "Passionate Friends," with Trafford in "Marriage," with Capes in "Ann Veronica," with the narrator in "The New Machiavelli," with Mr. Britling,—best of all, perhaps, with Benham in "The Research Magnificent."

As a novelist Mr. Wells believes in an adequate "register." He has, I think, endowed each one of his heroes with most of the interests, virtues, and aspirations uppermost in his own mind at the time of composition. They are men of wide embrace, these heroes. Their stream of consciousness customarily includes science, sociology, politics, and education, all subtly implicated with the pursuit of some freer, happier intercourse between the sexes. Each hero has a clear sense that there is something fine in him, "finer than the world and craving fine responses," and he explains this to a heroine, who, being a possessive "female" creature, doesn't more than half understand why he has to cart her off to Labrador or exile himself in Africa in order to understand what she and the world are about. But each hero incarnates what I have described as Mr. Wells's main intention: his desire to glorify, magnify, and energize the will and the reason as rulers and creators of a new world order, a new social order, new forms and qualities of personal relations.

The specific ideas which they have are discussed