1. His Life. Mr. Wells was born in Kent in the year 1866. His early education was private, and later he studied at London University. Here he finally graduated in science, zoology and kindred subjects being his special choice. But he had his living to earn while he carried on his studies, and the experiences of these early years are reflected in his novels. Teaching, lecturing, and journalistic work followed; but literature was not long in exercising its fascination, and an early measure of success was soon his portion. Henceforth he devoted himself to the writing of books, which command a wide public both in England and America.
2. His Works. For the literary historian the books of Mr. Wells provide an interesting study, as, in the course of their production, they register a clear development of manner. The books themselves are so numerous that here we can mention only the more important among them.
As was only to be expected, Mr. Wells began by utilizing his scientific training as an adjunct to his story-telling. His first efforts in fiction were a series of scientific romances, extremely ingenious in their mingling of fact and fiction, rapidly and felicitously narrated, and casting shrewd side-glances at many social problems. The best of this class were The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), and The Food of the Gods (1904). The second stage of the novelist’s career (slightly overlapping the first stage) was represented by a series of genuine novels, which reveal considerable talent in the manipulating of plot, a faculty, amounting to positive genius, for depicting ordinary people with zest, accuracy, and humor, and a clear and flexible style admirably in keeping with his subject. Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910) were representative of this group. In the third stage problems of modern society, social, religious, political, and commercial, which had all along strongly attracted the attention of Mr. Wells, elbowed themselves into the midst of the fictitious material, claiming an equal place. Of such a nature were Tono-Bungay (1909), which is almost an epical treatment of modern commercialism, Ann Veronica (1909), concerning a modern love-affair, and The New Machiavelli (1911), on contemporary politics. In the fourth stage the discursive and dogmatic elements take the principal place, subordinating the fictitious portions, as can be seen in Boon (1915), an extraordinary book, crammed with excellent lively literary criticism, but chaotic, splenetic, and irresponsible; Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916), a book treating of the Great War, with an able beginning, but a hazy and unsatisfactory conclusion; and Joan and Peter (1918), also dealing partly with the War, but much concerned with educational matters. A collection of short stories, The Country of the Blind (1911), contains, along with much that is scamped and trashy, some first-rate work, notably in the tale that gives the title to the book.
In addition to his numerous works of fiction Mr. Wells has written books that are almost entirely pamphlets, expressing his ideas on social and other problems; The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), A Modern Utopia (1905), and New Worlds for Old (1908) are only a few out of many. He has also, with much hardihood and considerable success, given the world The Outline of History (1920), a work that antagonized the pedants and charmed and instructed the ordinary intelligent man.
3. Features of his Novels. (a) Their “Modern” Quality. Possessed of an eager and inquiring mind, of great energy, and of a wide public ready to give ear to his opinions, Mr. Wells has come more and more to use the novel as a means of voicing his hopes, his criticisms, and his fears. Such a course must in the end bring about the decay of his novels as works of art. It is possible, indeed, that his later works will rapidly fall into oblivion, as did the later novels of George Eliot, who pursued a course in some respects similar to that of Mr. Wells. No one, however, can question the force and vivacity of his expressed opinions, and the eager reception that awaits them in many quarters. To many of his time he is the sage and prophet, as Carlyle, in his own fashion, was to the Victorian age; and as the need for Carlyle passed away with the problems that he handled, so, perhaps, will the need for the pen of Mr. Wells. It is possible that Kipps will be widely read when such works as The Soul of a Bishop have been entirely forgotten.
(b) Their Literary Quality. In addition to his intellectual gifts, Mr. Wells possesses an imagination of great power and grasp. This appears all through his works, being perhaps most prominent in the earlier romances, such as The First Men in the Moon, and in the earlier novels. In the novels the strength of Mr. Wells’s imagination becomes a positive drawback when it leads to overproduction, which in its turn brings a certain mechanical quality in the plot and in the central characters. His descriptions, however, alike of homely English scenes and of the most fantastic and barbarous regions, are brilliantly dashing and real. Like Dickens, he excels in the creation of ordinary folks, of the type of tradesmen and clerks, upon whom he expends a wealth of observation and humorous comment.
(c) Their Humor. Freshness and abundance are the outstanding qualities of Mr. Wells’s humor. Sometimes he is almost juvenile in his high spirits. In its more sober moments the humor is the urbane acceptance of men’s little weaknesses, somewhat patronizing perhaps, but sharply scrutinizing and faithfully recording. In other moods it is satirical, and then it is swift and destructive. In its more reckless phase it passes into jeering and irreverent laughter. The humor of Mr. Wells is a powerful weapon, and he is somewhat careless in his handling of it.
(d) His Style. The clearness and rapidity of Mr. Wells’s style has undoubtedly led to a lack of taste and balance and (in the mind of the reader) to a sense of improvisation. In its more careless passages it conveys the impression of a brilliant but shallow loquacity. The style, nevertheless, has some great and positive virtues: an instant command of epithet, a vivid pictorial quality, and sometimes a rich suggestiveness of romance. As an example of this last quality, the love-passages in The Country of the Blind are idyllically beautiful.
The two brief extracts that follow illustrate two different aspects of his style. The first is a picture of a tropical scene, the style resembling in some respects that of Mr. Conrad. It lacks the intimate detail of Mr. Conrad’s descriptions, but it is much less labored. The second is an example of the pictorial narrative power that is Mr. Wells’s chief claim to literary greatness:
(1) Here and there strange blossoms woke the dank intensities of green with a trumpet-call of colour. Things crept among the jungle and peeped and dashed back rustling into stillness. Always in the sluggishly drifting, opaque water were eddyings and stirrings; little rushes of bubbles came chuckling up lightheartedly from this or that submerged conflict and tragedy; now and again were crocodiles like a stranded fleet of logs basking in the sun. Still it was by day, a dreary stillness broken only by insect sounds and the creaking and flapping of our progress, by the calling of the soundings and the captain’s confused shouts; but in the night as we lay moored to a clump of trees the darkness brought a thousand swampy things to life, and out of the forest came screamings and howlings, screamings and yells that made us glad to be afloat. And once we saw between the tree stems long blazing fires. We passed two or three villages landward, and brown-black women and children came and stared at us and gesticulated, and once a man came out in a boat from a creek and hailed us in an unknown tongue; and so at last we came to a great open place, a broad lake rimmed with a desolation of mud and bleached refuse and dead trees, free from crocodiles or water birds or sight or sound of any living thing, and saw far off, even as Nasmyth had described, the ruins of the deserted station and hard by two little heaps of buff-hued rubbish under a great rib of rock. The forest receded. The land to the right of us fell away and became barren, and far off across a notch in its backbone was surf and the sea.