He was born, in 1866, at Bromley, Kent, where his father, a noted cricketer who played in the County team, kept a small glass and china and general shop. But the business failed; his father had to find employment; his mother went as housekeeper to a great house near Petersfield and Wells, then about thirteen, was apprenticed to a draper at Windsor. Before long, he left there to go to Midhurst as assistant to a chemist, and presently abandoned that profession to resume his interrupted schooling at Wimblehurst. Thence, in 1881, he went to be, for a brief period, pupil teacher at his uncle’s school in Somerset, and gave that up to take to his first trade again in a draper’s shop at Southsea. After two years of this, he emerged as assistant teacher at Midhurst Grammar School, till, having won a scholarship at the South Kensington School of Science, and taken his B.Sc. degree with honors, he secured an appointment to teach Science and English at Henley House School, St. John’s Wood. To increase his income, he passed from that to work as lecturer and tutor to some University Correspondence Classes, and the incessant and arduous labor this involved resulted in such a complete breakdown of health that he had to resign his appointment and go away to the south coast to rest and recuperate.
But before he was fairly convalescent the irksomeness of doing nothing and the need of getting an income prompted him to try his luck with his pen. So far his literary work had not gone beyond what I am told was an admirable biological text-book, contributions to technical journals, and a few occasional newspaper articles. He turned now to writing essays and sketches of a light and humorous kind, and found a ready market for them in the Pall Mall Gazette, and other papers. Once in the lists as a literary free-lance, he rode from success to success with astonishing deftness and energy. In 1895 he published “Select Conversations with an Uncle,” but it was eclipsed by the appearance in the same year of “The Stolen Bacillus and Other Stories,” and two of the most original and characteristic of his early imaginative tales, “The Time Machine” and “The Wonderful Visit.” Next year, hard on the heels of that grim fantasy, “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” came the most charmingly humorous, realistic-idyllic of his novels, “The Wheels of Chance.”
No man with a serious purpose should, in this country, retain a sense of humor. If nature has afflicted him with one, he should do his best to have it removed; it is more inimical to his well-being than an appendix. But Wells seems to be incurable, and that he has carelessly broken through all manner of prejudices to almost universal acceptance, in spite of his handicap of humor, is in itself a testimony to the power and quality of his work. If Darwin had followed “The Origin of Species” by writing “Three Men in a Boat” I doubt whether the pundits would have taken him seriously enough to have him buried in Westminster Abbey. Wells, having published a novel and three searching and profoundly earnest books on the Great War in 1914, burst forth next year with the farcical, bitingly satirical “Boon” and the irresponsibly laughable, “Bealby,” and immediately after appealed to us with his prophetic “What is Coming?” and one of his finest novels, and certainly the finest novel of the War, “Mr. Britling Sees it Through.”
All which is, of course, as it should be. It is your little man who has only one mood for all occasions, and dare not laugh and unbend from his pose and come down from his pedestal lest he should seem no bigger than those who had looked up to him. While other scholars are toiling laboriously to write the record of a single nation, or a single reign, Wells sandwiches between novel and novel that stupendous survey, “The Outline of History,” which is not only a scholarly and vastly comprehensive chronicle of the evolution of man and the progress of humanity the world over from the dawn of time to the day before yesterday, but is, as Macaulay rightly said all history ought to be, as easy and fascinating reading as any work of fiction.
No English author has a wider vogue outside his own country—he is popular in America, and in Russia, Germany, Scandinavia, where many other of our famous writers are unknown; and who was that Frenchman that, on a visit to London, expressed himself as agreeably surprised to discover that Wells is nearly as much appreciated over here as he is in France?
ISRAEL ZANGWILL
Israel Zangwill
Although I don’t think I ever exchanged a dozen words with him until recently, since the days of my youth I have felt a special personal interest in Israel Zangwill. With the passing of time, as it became possible to know him from his books and his public doings, that interest has strengthened to admiration and a real regard alike for the great qualities of his work and the courageous sincerity of his character; but I fancy it had its beginnings in quite trifling associations. We were both born Londoners, and started in the same way: when we were twenty, or less, we were competing against each other for prizes in a weekly paper called Society, and I believe his first appearance in print was with a prize story in that long deceased periodical. I am a little uncertain of the exact dates, but he was still in his twenties when he started Ariel, a brilliant rival to Punch, and I sent him some contributions for it which he did not use. About the same time I ran another short-lived rival to Punch myself, but he sent me no contributions for it, or, without desiring to heap coals of fire on his head, I should have used them. Then we both became members of the New Vagabond Club, and used to meet at its dinners occasionally and sometimes nod to each other, but never spoke. As a matter of fact, I don’t suppose he knew who I was and cannot have suspected that I entertained such warm and proprietorial sentiments toward him. For many years now, since his marriage (his wife, the daughter of Professor W. E. Ayrton, is herself a novelist of distinction), he has made his home at East Preston, in Sussex, and his visits to London have been few and far between. But when he was up on business, staying at his chambers in the Temple, I used to come across him at long intervals careering down the Strand or Fleet Street, and always felt I was meeting a sort of old friend, though, until recently, we passed without recognition.
It was in 1864 that he was born, his father being an exile who, lying under sentence of death for a trivial military offence, had escaped to this country from a Russian prison. He was educated at the Jews’ Free School, in East London, where, a year or two before taking his B. A. degree, with triple honors, at the London University, he became a teacher. But teaching, though he proved extraordinarily successful at it, was not to be his career. In 1888, he wrote in collaboration with Louis Cowen a farcical political romance, “The Premier and the Painter,” and presently resigned his scholastic engagement and proceeded to earn a livelihood by free-lance literature and journalism. That success did not come to him till he had paid for it in hard work you may know by the moral he drew from his memories of those days when he wrote (as J. A. Hammerton records in his “Humorists of To-Day”), “If you are blessed with some talent, a great deal of industry, and an amount of conceit mighty enough to enable you to disregard superiors, equals and critics, as well as the fancied demands of the public, it is possible, without friends, or introductions, or bothering celebrities to read your manuscripts, or cultivating the camp of log-rollers, to attain, by dint of slaving day and night for years during the flower of your youth, to a fame infinitely less wide-spread than a prize-fighter’s and a pecuniary position which you might with far less trouble have been born to.”