FICTION.
VISIONS AND WARNINGS.
The Dream. By H. G. Wells. (Cape. 7s. 6d.) FAR preferable to Mr. Wells the romantic is Mr. Wells the realist, and far preferable his account of the present-day world, distorted clumsily or cleverly by his irony, to his vision of life two thousand years hence with its frictions and sorrows scientifically charmed away. As to the party of Utopians in the Alpine guest-house, the men and women with astronomical or botanical or North American Indian names who listened to Sarnac's dream of his twentieth- century existence, Mr. Wells is not very explicit about them. We gather that they went about naked, and that they were, either as a cause or a consequence of this, freed from sexual snares and misunderstandings. If they were monogamous, they were not bound by any rite or sacrament. There is no ceremony, declares one of the characters, deprecating marriage, when the axe is fitted to its helve.
The Dream shows Mr. Wells diluted but not at all desic- cated. The " beautiful " passages are as oily as ever, the expression of emotion as lofty, the quality of emotion as low. What an admirable sense of humour he still has the earlier chapters of the book prove—the chapters that deal with Harry Mortimer Smith's boyhood and youth, his struggle for education, his charming father the greengrocer, his mother whose ignorant conventional morality is living and human, however absurd its manifestations. But this sense of humour reveals itself sporadically, like currants in a cake ; it is not pervasive, it never leavens the whole lump or prompts self-criticism. Otherwise we should have been spared those blush-making passages in which Harry's wife, mathematically convicted of unfaithfulness, apostrophizes him with the words " Oh Husbind-boy 1" and spared also the love-scenes, lyrical only in so far as they are inflated, passionate only in so far as they are uncontrolled. The story itself is a good one, but Mr. Wells will not lose himself in it or let us ; he preaches continually.
Miss Borden also has a text, but whether it embodies a commandment or a prohibition one cannot readily tell. With the exception of the heroine's father the characters present themselves as warning beacons, of all- the deeper shades of red, suspended over precipices varying in height but all fatal to happiness. They are so well drawn that it is a pleasure to follow their fates backwards, to see where they missed and where exceeded the mark, as some people follow the pre-natal course of a cold contracted, they believe, by carelessness. But such an analysis yields no results of value. Of the three girl friends, Joan Fairfax, Louise Bowers and Phyllis Day, the " triumphirate,* as they styled them- selves, who helped the well-born boys of Iroquois (or Chicago) to make war on the Hicks or comparative guttersnipes, each had a different upbringing. Joan, the Romantic Woman, was a precocious globe-trotter ; Louise, whose fate it was to be murdered by her husband, spent three years in a Parisian convent ; Phyllis stayed in Iroquois. In after life they met again, only to foim, with their respective but so interchangeable husbands, a kind of irregular hexagon and spoil each others' lives. Obviously, in the welter of decadence and indignity into which they had sunk the victory must go to her who felt least or had most control of her feelings ; and this was Joan herself, Joan the idealist. At the age of fourteen before a gaping congregation she had testified to having found religion ; she had been inexpressibly shocked by the conversation of Army people at an Indian frontier station ; she rejected her lover the first time he asked her to marry him because she knew him to be fond of another woman. She accepted him the second time ; and the rest of her descent though not easy was continuous.
What, then, we ask ourselves, did Joan Fairfax want ? She married a man whose background satisfied her romantic cravings ; he was heir to the dukedom he eventually inherited.. His was a romantic figure if not a romantic temperament. Her love for him, as she often declared, was largely physical she admired " the delightful cavity under his waistcoat." Then what right had she, lured by the love of an abdominal depression, to expect of her husband a hundred subtle signs of imaginative insight and spiritual sympathy, in fact all " the finest parts of pure love " ? Probably, what she chiefly missed in him was an emotional vocabulary ; his understatements disappointed her. In spite of his frailties Binky is a charming figure, and it is characteristic of Miss Borden's skill to let that charm show through Joan's distorted account of him. Joan herself, though always interesting, is too inconsistent to be always convincing. Her Puritan upbringing accounts for her wilfulness, her egotism, her inability to take things as they came ; but the corruption of her will, the hardening process that she alternately defends and deplores, is hard to follow or to explain by any doctrine save that of corruptio optimi pessima. Except for occasional obscurities, the 'story moves easily under its tremendous burden of complication and allusion ; and to have united so much sophistication with so much sincerity is in itself a very considerable achievement.
It is almost incredible that the author of The Gentleman from San Francisco should also have written The Village. The difference of quality is great but the difference of subject and treatment much greater. The stories- collected here show Bunin's talent in all its versatility. If he nowhere reproduces the hard gem-like surface of his masterpiece, neither does he squander himself as he did in The Village. The peculiar brutality he attributes to the Russian peasantry is more impressive in the short story " A Night Conversation " than it is in his novel ; there is no space for the theme to be worn bare by repetition. Many of his stories show dazzling feats of presentation : " The Dreams of Chang " is told through the consciousness of a dog, " Brethren " depicts successively the unformulated agony of a rickshaw man robbed of his sweetheart and the neurotic introspection of the Englishman, his fare. Bunin, though a confirmed sensa- tionalist, is a short-story writer of great power.
L. P. HARTLEY.
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