The New Republic/Volume 1/Number 1/Mr. Wells Avoids Trouble
Mr. Wells Avoids Trouble
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H. G. Wells. New York: The Macmillan Co. $1.50.
SOMEWHERE in "The New Machiavelli" H. G. Wells pictures himself surrounded by piles of manuscripts discarded in an effort to find a true account of his story. When I finished reading "The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman" I wondered whether Mr. Wells had not passed beyond the stage of rejecting any part of his own work as inadequate. For though his latest book is amusing, and perhaps useful, it is a careless book written with a comfortable facility out of the upper layers of his mind. You say to yourself, Wells has turned out another book. You cannot say to yourself, as you could of his earlier work, Wells has learned from fresh experience and Wells is giving of that experience. For "Tono-Bungay" and "The New Machiavelli" were wrung with tortured sincerity out of a man's own life, and they were scarred and shapeless with the effort; they seemed to stammer inevitably into Well's famous suspension points, with their own inner need for the elusive fringes of the truth.
Since he wrote "The New Machiavelli" Wells seems like a man who has retired to live in the country on the proceeds of his accumulated spiritual capital. Where formerly each book had been a fresh adventure and a new conquest, these later ones seem like creations from an armchair which cost little and give little. No doubt it is understandable that men should grow weary of danger, that arctic explorers should become lecturers and that old soldiers should write their memoirs, that Wells should plagiarize Wells. Few men who write have driven themselves as he has driven himself. The old Wells seemed to be living in a chronic crisis, in which there were immense visions and shattering disappointments, a gorgeous socialism breaking its heart over the actual facts. In the characters he created love was a pursuit in which the woman his hero desired was always just beyond the one he possessed. He was forever adjusting his hope to reality, trying almost in agony to find in England a home for his dreams. And because that struggle was relentless, Wells has come to typify the modern man, his weakness and his constant relapses, his tentative hope and his overwhelming tasks.
For what distinguished Wells among the Utopians is the fact that his Utopia was never finished and that every new experience amended it radically. He was not content to indulge his fancy or to clamor for freedom. He seemed to live in that dangerous region where freedom is being tried and vision embodied. He seemed to be buffeted from all sides, challenged by his dreams which revolted at the compromises of reality, and assaulted by reality which denounced the emptiness of all dreams. He seemed to spend himself in that struggle—the severest that a man can face; and he seemed to win by a constant renewal of effort in which he refused to sink either into placid acceptance of the world, or into self-contained satisfaction with his vision.
But in his later books there has been an evident slackening of effort, betrayed at first by a too great fluency of style, an increase of mannerism, a tendency to large rhetoric, and to plots which creak along by accident. Worse than that, his heroines have become distant and beautiful, they have moved up in society as heroines do, so that of late a Wells heroine to have a soul and to suffer must also have a title. Moreover, the villain has appeared, as the husband in "The Passionate Friends," as Sir Isaac in this book. Now a villain is a device for shirking the issue; you ascribe all the difficulties to him, and your story can proceed. But he is fatal to the truth, as the earlier Wells would have proclaimed on every page.
Yet here is the villain drawn as an uncannily malignant figure who is responsible for modern commercialism and for the suffering of generous souls like the wife, Lady Harman. "Poor Sir Isaac had lived like a blind thing in the sunlight, gathering and gathering, when the pride and pleasure of life is to administer and spend ...." And you take it from this book that only when he dies is freedom possible. At any rate, Lady Harman kisses the other man and the final note is a happy one. The earlier Wells, I think, would have begun the book there; he would have written the history of the marriage of well-meaning Lady Harman and well-meaning and inadequate Mr. Brumley. He would, in short, have faced the real problem of love and business and politics, which is not of black villains and of white heroines, but of maundering and confused human beings.
Wells has tried to write that book several times, but of late the effort seems too great for him, and so he writes instead these hasty, imitative, and somewhat querulous additions to the stock of the popular novel. There has perhaps always been in him a tendency to run away from his problem. His distressed heroes and heroines have fled to laboratories or gone up in balloons or committed suicide. He himself has fled recently from the business of reconstruction to a very thin picture of "The World Set Free." Generally he has conquered this weakness or compensated it by a great mass of honest speculation and vivid experience, but in this latest book the flight has become precipitative amidst a wreckage of abstract nouns in the plural and absurdly simplified accounts of human motive. For the mere fact that Wells has written about marriage as if the wife were all innocence and the husband all villainy is in itself the most distressing commentary on this book.