Knowing Wells's habit of introducing autobiographical details into his romances, we inevitably surmise that Mr. Britling is himself. Mr. Britling is a writer whom "lots of people found interesting and stimulating, and a few found seriously exasperating." "He had ideas in the utmost profusion about races and empires and social order and political institutions and gardens and automobiles and the future of India and China and esthetics and America and the education of mankind in general.... And all that sort of thing."
This certainly reads like Wells's repertory of ideas. And to make the resemblance closer Mr. Britling writes a pamphlet, "And Now War Ends", shortly after the war began—just as Mr. Wells wrote "The War That Will End War." Several of the characters are recognizable as Mr. Wells' neighbors. At any rate we may be sure that the book reveals the changing moods not only of the author but of every thinking Englishman as the enormity, the awfulness, the all-pervasiveness of the war became slowly realized in the course of many months.
As a contrast to his typical Englishman Mr. Wells brings in an American, handled with more skill than British writers usually show in dealing with American psychology. The delight of his Mr. Direck at the recognition of the scenes and customs he had known from history and novels is well presented:
The Thames, when he sallied out to see it, had been too good to be true, the smallest thing in rivers he had ever seen, and he had had to restrain himself from affecting a marked accent and accosting some passerby with the question, "Say! But is this little wet ditch here the Historical River Thames?" In America, it must be explained, Mr. Direck spoke a very good and careful English indeed, but he now found the utmost difficulty in controlling his impulse to use a high-pitched nasal drone and indulge in dry Americanisms and poker metaphors upon all occasions. When people asked him questions he wanted to say "Yep" or "Sure", words he would no more have used in America than he could have used a bowie knife. But he had a sense of rôle. He wanted to be just exactly what he supposed an Englishman would expect him to be.
Every American tourist in England has felt this temptation. He also has the experience ascribed by Mr. Wells to his American of finding that England on closer acquaintance is not so antiquated as she looks. When asked what his impression of England is Mr. Direck answers:
That it looks and feels more like the traditional Old England than any one could possibly have believed, and that in reality it is less like the traditional Old England than any one would ever possibly have imagined. I thought when I looked out of the train this morning that I had come to the England of Washington Irving. I find that it is not even the England of Mrs. Humphry Ward.
To complete this study of national psychology there is also a German in the family circle at first, a tutor whose hobbies are Ido and internationalism and a universal index, traits drawn from Professor Ostwald apparently. He is not caricatured but we suspect that like Mr. Direck, the American, Herr Heinrich is affected by British expectations and appears more German than he is.
The book reëchoes all the passions of the war,—love, hatred, courage, despair, meanness, sacrifice, heroism, selfishness, stoicism and mad wrath,—but ends upon a clear religious tone such as has been heard but faintly in any work of Mr. Wells before. What Mr. Britling sees through is not the war, for nobody can yet see so far as that, but he sees through the doubt and turmoil of his own mind and finds internal peace in the midst of warfare. When he sits down to write a letter to the parents of Heinrich, who like his own son had fallen in France, his mind is torn by conflicting emotions, but finally these are resolved into one common chord and he writes:
Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until a man has found God and been found by God, he begins at no beginning, he works to no end. He may have his friendships, his partial loyalties, his scraps of honor. But all these things fall into place and life falls into place only with God. Only with God. God, who fights through men against Blind Force and Night and Non-Existence; who is the end, who is the meaning. He is the only King.... Of course I must write about Him. I must tell all my world of Him. And before the coming of the true King, the inevitable King, the King who is present whenever just men foregather, this bloodstained rubbish of the ancient world, these puny kings and tawdry emperors, these wily politicians and artful lawyers, these men who claim and grab and trick and compel, these war makers and oppressors, will presently shrivel and pass—like paper thrust into a flame. Our sons have shown us God.