The Trenchards are a kind of family Trollope might have created had he been living now; “The Cathedral” is a kind of story he might have told, with its realistic melodrama and its clerical atmosphere, but Walpole tells it with a subtler art in the writing and the construction, with a conciseness and charm of style that are outside the range of the earlier novelist. Trollope was fat, ponderous, bewhiskered; Walpole is tall, well-knit, clean-shaven, looks even younger than his years, is nimble-witted and modern-minded; and the two do not differ more in personality than in their manner of telling a tale. The tale, and the truth of it, may be the law for both, but though they row in the same boat, to apply the pun to Douglas Jerrold, it is with very different skulls.
Most of Walpole’s work is done at his cottage by the sea in Cornwall; he retires to that seclusion when a new idea has taken hold upon him, stays there for some months at a stretch, then, with another novel completed, returns to London for recreation, and is a very familiar figure again at all manner of social functions, and one of the cleverest and most popular of after-dinner speakers. “We love him out yonder,” an American assured me; “none of your author-lecturers who come over to us has larger or more delighted audiences.” A cousin of the Earl of Orford, I have seen it said that he indirectly inherits no little of the wit and shrewd worldly wisdom of his distant kinsman Horace Walpole; but the realism and haunting mysticism of “The Dark Forest” have nothing in common with the crudely romantic terrors of “The Castle of Otranto,” and his wit and perspicacity are mitigated by a genial human kindness that is no part of that conjectural inheritance.
HERBERT GEORGE WELLS
Herbert George Wells
H. G. Wells made one of his mistakes—even the wisest of us have to make a few—when, during a controversy with Henry James, he breezily denied that he was an artist and proclaimed himself a journalist. I think he must have said it with his tongue in his cheek; anyhow, it was a mistake to put that opinion into anybody’s mind and those words into anybody’s mouth, for there are always critics and artists, mainly of the lesser breeds, ready enough, without such prompting, to belittle any greatness that gets in their way.
Undoubtedly, Wells is a journalist, and a mightily efficient one; but he is also as subtle and fine an artist as you shall find among our living men of letters, and something of an authentic prophet, to boot. I hope his ideal state will never be realized; it is too dreadfully efficient, too exactly organized, so all mechanical, with human beings clicking in as part of the machinery that, if it ever came to pass, life in it would be reduced to such monotony that I am quite certain he would himself be one of the first to emigrate. You may say the journalist is uppermost in his social and economic gospels, such as “A Modern Utopia” and “New Worlds for Old,” in those wonderful imaginative, inventive scientific romances, “The First Men in the Moon,” “The War of the Worlds,” “The War in the Air,” “Men Like Gods,” and in novels so given over to problems of religion, morals, sex, education and general contemporary life and conduct as are “God the Invisible King,” “Joan and Peter,” “Ann Veronica,” “The Soul of a Bishop,” “The Undying Fire,” and “The Secret Places of the Heart,” yet in all these it could be demonstrated that the artist and the prophet collaborated with the journalist. It has been said that when in those early romances he foresaw the coming of the Great War and the part the aeroplane would play in it he was no prophet but a clever prognosticator who had followed the progress of invention, noted certain tendencies and calculated their developments as one might work out a problem in mathematics, and that a prophet needs no such guides to knowledge but speaks by inspiration and is concerned only with the things of the spirit. However that may be, it is with the things of the spirit that he is mostly preoccupied in at least three of the six later novels I have just mentioned and, to name but one, his vision of “God the Invisible King” is more like prophetic utterance than any we have had in our time.
But he is before all else an artist in the greatest of his novels—in “The Wheels of Chance,” “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” “Kipps,” “The History of Mr. Polly,” “Tono Bungay” and “The New Machiavelli,” in “The Country of the Blind” and nearly all the other short stories in the same volume. That book epitomises Wells’s versatile genius; its stories represent in little nearly every variety of his work. They are by turns fantastic, humorous, supernatural, visionary, grimly terrible and sternly or sympathetically realistic. Personally, I like him best here, as in his larger works, when his stories are all of ordinary men and women living average human lives in the light of common day; but his bizarre studies in psychology, his short tales of the eerie, nightmare order and those that grow out of surprising scientific discoveries are fashioned with an art as sure and as strong and as finished. If the author of “The Country of the Blind” and “Kipps” is not an artist but a journalist the sooner our other writers of fiction take to journalism the better, both for them and for us.
He is one of those exceptional authors who are in themselves exactly what they seem to be in their books. Unaffected, alive with energy, sociable, genially talkative, it is an amusing object lesson to see him seated at a public dinner next to some distinguished but orthodox philosopher of less learning than himself, younger but looking older, with none of his imaginary power, his far-seeing vision, his originality and suggestiveness as a thinker, who is yet clothed in the gravity, reticence, aloofness that are supposed to denote superior wisdom. There is nothing so impressive in Wells’s manner, his quick gestures, his high, not unpleasant voice; but his keen gray eyes, with a humorous twinkle in the depths of them, look out from under a broad, massive forehead that prevents his appearance from being commonplace. Sidney Dark has called him “The Superman-in-the-Street.” He is a great deal more than that, but he owes his deep knowledge of humanity, his broad sympathy with its sufferings and aspirations to the fact that he did at the outset share the homely satisfactions, the limitations and disadvantages that are the lot of the man-in-the-street, grew wise in those experiences, and carried the memory of them with him into the study. A far more profitable proceeding than to arrive in the study ignorant and learn of the outer world from hearsay or from what others have written.
Socialist, scientist, practical idealist, immensely interested in men and affairs, insatiably curious about all life, its origins, implications, possibilities, restlessly delving into the history and mystery of the past for truths that would light his guesses at the darker mystery of the future, it was natural for Wells to put his latest interests into each new book that he wrote, whether it was a matter-of-fact philosophical treatise or romantic or realistic fiction. If this habit of using as material for his work whatever was readiest to hand led to his scandalizing friends and acquaintance by putting even them, under thin disguises, into certain of his novels, he has, at least, put himself into them also and no little of his autobiography. You may trace the growth of his mind, the development of his ideas through his successive books. He has been accused of inconsistency by those who fancied his opinion had changed because it had matured, that he had acquired a new root when he had merely grown new branches. All his life, as somebody once said, he has been thus educating himself in the public eye, but he was educating himself strenuously and in face of many difficulties long before the eye of the public became aware of him.