(Cape, Mr. Wells is once again giving the world a dressing-down—th "drowsy old germ-saturated world He is once more scarifying its religion, its education, its tenacity tradition, its dis regard of science and its Tuetanee to organize itself. Once more does he attempt to demonetrate how cramping our code of sex is to choice spirits. It is a world of muddle and wretchedness," and his story is "a story of love crossed, imaginations like flies that have fallen into gum, things withheld and things forbidden. And all for nothing. All for pride and spite."
All very sad, and yet a leo, bright book, ilastrating Dr. Ban's remark that "Art is Nature freed from the painful." This evasion of depression is possibly aided by the author's new device for getting perspective. Tu a very recent, romance he portrayed our frail humanity, from the spy-hole of a fourth dimension. This time he takes us to a world two thousand years. ahead, Where someone dreams in an hour a. whole twentieth-century existence and. retells itt his "companions. "They are not deftly" manoeuvres, these heirs of maturity, with their "bare, strong, bodies," their freedom from. sex-Jealousy and their intellectual emancipation. "So poorly are they dram: tised that it is dimeult, in following their dialogue, to "tell'tother from which." But they do help passively to dramatist Mr. Wells as a critic of existence and also to give the anodyne of detachment to. picture of squalor and' entaiglement.
It is the grim, lower middle-class under-world of "Tone-Bungay" and "Mr, Polly," traversed once more, with a "heightening of selective vision, a better sense of character! and amore subtle balance of narrative.
It is a common objection to] Mr. Wells's later novels that nearly all their figures elude the memory, and that more of the books them: elves fade into leaflets of free-love Propagands. But one seems to discern a better expectation of life here in some of Henry Mortimer Smith's family circle. Not so much in his Ddeautiful sister Fanny, who goes away to be a newspaper magnate's mistress and lives happily. ever after, asin her overwrought mother, whose tense of the fitness of things sincerely outraged when she finds that Fanny has not "reaped as she has sown." This. poor mother, in whom Mr. Wells diagnoses a stron touch of vindictive trade. unionism in morals, is a masterly portrait of human goodness warped" by." constriction, squeezed dry of imagin tion and generosity, and reduced tough unlovely fibre. Nothing. is spared in restraint oF finish, and she has not the sublimation' of Mr. Hardy's women, there is the same effect of pity enhanced by detachment, "The father, too, a struggling ereengrocer, with his voluble inter Providence and its "lessons, insecure commercial moral ity, stands well out in the round, as does Uncle John Julip, the dis-head gardener, and Matilda Good, graduate in all the lore of London landladies, Such part of the plot as hinges upon passion will have no. surprise for the habitual reader of Mr. Wells, Dbut all will enjoy the raciness of an fconoclasm that shows no staleness what must be something like its twentieth innings. It is all but free from the blemishes of exaggeration, ud rich in the varied resources of intellectual" caricature.—The "Observer."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.