NO
TONO-BUNGAY.*
IN this strange go.as-you-please narrative, which, spite of its irregular and discursive method, is the most serious attempt at a novel which he has hitherto undertaken, Mr. Wells has given us a strong, sincere, but in the main repellent work. It is a difficult book to review because of its wide range and varied suggestiveness, and, above all, because of the entire absence of that self-effacement deliberately practised by some of the greatest artists in fiction. It is true that at the outset the author, in the person of the narrator, disclaims all pretensions to artistic presentation. It is true, again, that the story is cast throughout in the form of an imaginary autobiography. But the narrative is freely interspersed with digressions, reflections, monelogues, and essays, which so closely accord with the views expressed by Mr. Wells in his other works that it is difficult to aveid identifying the views of the author with those of the narrater. Again, some of the touches in the narrative are so curiously circumstantial as to convey a strong impression that we are reading, not of imagined, but of actual experiences. The bleoding of Wa,hrheit mut Dichtung in fiction can never be wholly eliminated ; but when it takes the form of confessions of a most intimate character, in which the narrator turns himself inside out with ruthless conscientiousness, the result is often disconcerting, and even painful. The author has not pre- served a judicial detachment from his characters ; on the contrary, by associating all these reflective comments with the narrator, and attributing to him a number of opinions and interests which he has himself espoused, he has to that extent chosen to challenge rather than conciliate the reader. It would have been quite possible, so far as we can see, to have kept his personality entirely apart ; but Mr. Wells has chosen otherwise, and the skill with which he has repro- dueed the mingled complacency and humiliation of George Ponderevo's oufessions only serves to prejudice one against the Wellsian philosophy of life, As for the story, it is the life-history of George Ponderevo, the son of the housekeeper in a great Kentish mansion, organised and administered on feudal principles. Mrs. Penderevo, who has been deserted by a worthless husband, is a 'bard, honest Woman, obsequiously attached to her mistress, Lady Drew. George lives or spends his holidays at the great house in more or less inarticulate revolt against the system, until he incurs a sentence of banishment for thrashing a young nobleman, but not before he has made precocious love to an even more precocious young lady of rauk.—This whole episode, we may remark, strikes us as ex- tremely improbable, and wholly untypical of the treatment that would have been meted out in real life to euoh conduct on the part of a servant's son.—George is then apprenticed to his * rono•Bunpay. By II. G. Was. London, Macnillbu and Co. L6s.3. uncle Edward, a chemist in a small neighbouring town, end lives with him until his speculations involve him in a bankruptcy which swallows up George's patrimony. The boy is taken on by his uncle's successor, works his way up the ladder of learning, matriculates at London University, wins a scholarship, and is already resolved to specialise in science, when his uncle, who has successfully launched a quack remedy on the market, offers him a salary and a share in the business. George is fully aware that his uncle is a charlatan and the drug a fraud, but he is anxious to marry, and closes with the offer. • For seven years he is bound up with the fortunes of " Tono-Bungay " and its various offshoots, tastes the illicit sweete of company-promoting, shares he successes and is involved in the collapse of his uncle's unscrupulous enterprise. Meantime he has wearied of, deceived, deserted, and been divorced by his blameless but insipid wife ; he has achieved distinction as a man or science and aerial navigator, conducted an expedition to West Africa in search of a mysterious radio- active substance, and murdered a. 'negro. He has long broken off the liaison with the "magnificently eupeptic" typewriting girl which led to his divorce, and resumed amorous relations with Lady Beatrice, the precocious girl mentioned above,. who has developed into an aristocratic courtesan of the most advanced and aggressive type. He offers her marriage, but she repeatedly refuses, realising her antipathy to domestic life, and they drift apart, George henceforth devoting his energies to the construction of destroyers.
Though by no means impartial in his analysis of the slow decay of the old social system, Mr. Wells bears adequate, if reluctant, testimony to its tenacity and permanence, and frankly admits that, with all its limitations, it is preferable to the new plutocratic regime which threatens to take its place. (Curiously enough, however, he chooses the name Lichtenstein, borne by one of the most exclusive Austrian noble houses, to typify the Semitic invasion !) On the other hand, though from boyhood instinctively inclined to rebel against authority, the narrator-hero is at beat half-hearted in his antinomianism. He is not a valiant or, to borrow Mr. Wells's own phrase, a magnificently eupeptio sinner. He is painfully self-conscious, always on the defensive with his social superiors, anxious to impress them by his speech or his actions. He is unable to defy convention with equanimity, and casts the responsibility for his lapses on Nature, or the social system, or his neighbour. Driven by mere passion into an ill-assorted marriage, he extricates himself ignobly. Love with him is not a liberal education, but an appetite : there is no touch of spirituality in his grancle passion for Lady Beatrice, who, for the rest, is quite a melodramatic and phantasmal figure. Far better than this dreary or lurid harping on the sex problem are the passages in which Mr. Wells is stirred to eloquence by the contemplation of the grandeur or squalor of London, by the magic of its ancient river. The • romantic side of the mad game of modern commercial and journalistic adventure ; the dodges of forcing worthless wares on a gullible public and getting rich quick,—all this is described with the utmost verve and a strange mixture of oontemptand tolerance. Without justifying these methods, Mr. Wells conveys the impression that they may prove a valuable school for sharpening one's wits. As for hie general outlook, nothing could be more pessimistic. We are on the eve of tremendous discoveries in the direction of applied science ; but, as a set-off, the race is degenerating, and the individuals who "conic through "—like the narrator—do so by virtue of vehement self-assertion, by stifling the voice of conscience, by a callous disregard of human life and family ties. Yet this inhumanity is tempered with moments of misgiving and spasms of remorse. Viewed, therefore, as a novel with a purpose, Tono-Bungay, with its reluctant tributes to orthodoxy and the training of the old school, cannot be regarded as an effectual protest against the existing order. It is disfigured in places by a perverted sincerity which disregards the Tacitean precept, abseoncli clebent ftagitia, but it is at least never dull, and it introduces us to one character, Susan Ponderevo, the wife of the quack medicine-man, whose undistinguished but delightful humour renders her almost as captivating a personage as the immortal Mr. Hoopdriver.
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