Fiction
Blowing Bubbles
Or all our serious writers Mr. IL G. Wells is the easiest to abuse and misunderstand because abuse and misunderstanding are his own electioneering weapons. But he is the most genial, vital and inspiriting of our orators. His gestures are those of a man alive to his finger tips. Refrain from useless heckling, and the splendid electoral promises come in bubbles to his lips, and become, as they float away on the air, new and sparkling worlds. Why not enjoy the sight of a man blowing bubbles so earnestly ? Why stick pins into his miracles and visions ? Are they not intended to be the miracles and visions that creak faith, claiming no intrinsic verity of their own ?
Perhaps we should define him rather as the perfect big- circulation journalist, the perfect disseminator of the new faith which is rising like a weird gas from the chemical action of Big Business upon the modem world—the persuasive sentimentalist who colours these vapours so that they appear to be desirable, Utopian clouds. For since the days of Tono Bungay and the sudden fortune of hipps, Mr. Wells has had a sneaking but growing admiration for Big Business. lie has heard, with approval, the voice of one crying in the wiklerness of Detroit, saying, " History is bunk." The word " big " delights him, as it delights a child. Tear up the old drawing of the world and make a bigger one ! Rough in the huge emotional outline and leave the details, the awkward grafting of the future on to the present stem, to the elders and the clerks.
Big Business has the virtue of solving big problems in the simplest of ways : it buys them. This was the habit of Sir
Bossy Woodcock, the shrewd, vulgar and easily identifiable millionaire, of this novel, who naturally bought the dream war into which Mr. Parham's donnish militarism had thrown the world. The world made safe through buying : that is as fair is caricature of Mr. 1Vells's new message as The Autocracy of Mr. Parham is of his ancient enemies : tradition, patriot- ism, duty, soldiers, Fascism and the older universities. I low spontaneously in tune he is with the spirit of our age and the traditional spirit of our caste system ! Mr. Parham, a chilly and pompous Oxford dun, with one agitated eye for the ladies and the other for the long chance, a teacher of history with a privy little comer in Richelieu, a tittle for wine, good meat, tradition, authority and continuity, and a gentlemanly belief in the spiritual and physical necessity of war, allows himself to be " taken up " by Sir Busty Woodcock and to be added to his collection which includes anyone from chorus-girls to duchesses. Sir Busty decides " to have a look at " spiritualism and takes Mr. Parham to a Mier—Mr. 'Wells's excellent topical sense !—where he falls asleep and dreams that he is the Master Spirit who has cone to save England from ruin. Here the sword of satire lashes out. He abolishes Parliament, rules like a Mussolini—lie e.en goes to see the lire-eating Paramuzzi in Bome—and gradually falling into the hands of the Generals and Mr. Brimstone Burehell, soon involves England in a world war, America abstaining. This abstention does not prevent the English and American fleets doing what they were built to do : destroy each other, "in a naval demon- stration." Mr. Parham awakes front his dream just as the scientists refuse jo tell their gas which Sir Busty has cornered.
The absurd apotheosis of the den for the purposes of satire is a sublime piece of malice, but Mr. Wells is never satitliel with his own comic genius. He is never content to be entirely the genial creator of common, mean and funny little people, or the satirist. His irony becomes at times like a rapier that has been dulled at the point through being used as a schoolmaster's pointer for beating the blackboard instead of the enemy. And Mr. Parham is far more significant and instructive before his apotheosis than after it. Perhaps we ought to treat the book as letterpress to the ten very funny cartoons by Low included in it.
Elinor Barley is a book that might have pleased Mr. Parham both because of the fastidiousness and cool elegance of its production, and the preciosity of its treatment. Ile would have been able to experience vicariously the emotions, memories and calculations of a murderess. Awaiting the gallows, for the murder of her second husband, a farmer's daughter recalls the happiness of her first marriage, the trivial accident which brought it to an end and the conspiracy of circumstance which drove her into a second marriage with a loutish man below her station. As an exercise in the macabre of plain statement. with little acceleration of emotional development, or change of character, the story has a cool objectivity and merit. The transition from phase to phase is smooth and rapid. Depth and perspective arc sacrificed. Elinor Barley shows remark-
able virtuosity but the method of " Moll Flanders " is more satisfying in a longer and richer narrative.
Mr. Stephen Hudson's pieces are also precious, elegant and brief. One never knows his people : one overhears someone talking about them. It is all as bewildering as that nonsense verse :
" If ever you or she should come
To speak of this affair Ho trusts to her to sot them free Exactly as we were."
This is a misquotation, but a misquotation cannot alter the meaning of a verse like that ; and, in an indelicate way, it conveys the elusiveness of a delicate writer. He avoids the gross parturition of the imagination ; his figments of observed reality must he inferred. It is, for instance, many pages before one realizes that this faithful servant of a great writer who is building a bulwark of a few habits and a few friends against the advance of death, is a woman. What kind of we-man, though it is she who writes, one never quite knows. Another story, again in the equivocal first person, describes merely a woman sitting with her lover cn the terrace of a casino and hatching another party take their seats. Again, we are given only the aroma of a relationship. Another story is even more elusive : scraps of desultory talk about nothing on is hot night in an American town. Mr. Hudson is a sensitive writer. He catches the amnia. But where and what are the flowers ?
Kyra, my Sister, falls into three parts, the first of which is extremely tedious ; the others are superficially exciting. The scene is in the Balkans and the hero is a youthful ?west who recounts the history of his early vagabondage front a house of smugglers and prostitutes to moral corruption in the palaces of certain wealthy Turks through whose bands he passes. The book somehow escapes being sordid ; something in the rapid, earnest, romancing style of the teller saves it, or possibly one is unaffected because the whole narrative never becomes real. The author protests greatly the sufferings and emotions of the young man, but one cannot credit so unsubtle and glib a hero with great feeling. The one misfortune which genuinely
stirred him was the loss of his money. Murder will out : Was Mr. Istrati trying earnestly all the time to intrigue his sentimental French readers, and shock his English public ? To do him justice, the translation, which is from the French,
does not seem particularly sensitive. V. S. PRITCHETT.
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