I have reached something like a climax with this passage; a climax that I would willingly maintain if it were possible, inasmuch as it holds a representation of that unchanging influence which I find as an inspiration and a force behind all H.G.  Wells’ books.  Necessarily this vital inspiration is, as he says, “mixed with other things”; he has had to find a means to express it, and our means of expression is limited not only by our own powers but in a large degree by the limitations of the audience addressed.  Moreover H.G.  Wells’ art represents him in that it is a practical art.  He is, in an unspecialised sense, a pragmatist.  He comes back from his isolations to find in this world all the substance and potentialities of beauty both in outward appearance and in conduct.  And he is not content to vapour of ideals.  He recognises that the stuff of admiration and desire that animates his own being is present throughout humanity.  Only the sight of it is obscured by all those stupidities and condescensions to rule-of-thumb that he attacks so furiously.  Those are the impediments that he would clear away, and he acknowledges that they stand between him and his own sight of beauty.  He is compelled always to struggle—­and we can see the signs of it in all he writes—­with his own weakness and limitations; criticising himself as he satirises the thing condemned, but striving without ceasing to serve the purpose of that which he knows is “struggling to exist.”  This, to me, is the spirit of H.G.  Wells, and I find it a spirit that is as admirable as it is human....

The Passionate Friends (1913) is another experiment in exposition.  The very real and fine love of Stafford (the autobiographer in this case) and Lady Mary Christian is spoiled, made to appear insignificant and debased, by all the conventions and petty, unoriginal judgments that go to the making of the rule of our society.  The woman had to make her choice between love in an undignified poverty for which all her training had unfitted her, and a sterile ease and magnificence that gave her those opportunities which her temperament and education demanded.  She chose for dignity and opportunity, was tempted to grasp at love, and thus finally came into a blind alley from which death was the only escape.  It is another picture of the old conflict illustrated in the persons of Ann Veronica and Marjorie Trafford; the constant inability that our conditions impose on the desire to love beautifully.  The implicit demand is that for greater freedom for women, socially and economically.  Incidentally we see that the man, Stafford, does not suffer in the same degree.  His splendid love for Lady Mary is thwarted, but he finds an outlet.  It is a new aspect of escape, by the way, for Stafford’s illuminating business of spreading and collating knowledge is a relief from the scientific research which was in some form or another the specific of the earlier novels—­if we exclude Remington’s