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unable, and still more unwilling, to approach you, or to take leave of
you, in any projected light of criticism, in any judging or concluding,
any comparing, in fact in any aesthetic or literary , relation at all; and
this in spite of the fact that the light of criticism is almost that in which
I most fondly bask and that the amusement I consequently renounce is
one of the dearest of all to me. I simply decline that s the way the thing
works to pass you again through my cerebral oven for critical consumption:
I consume you crude and whole and to the last morsel, cannibalistically,
quite, as I say; licking the platter clean of the last possibility of a savour
and remaining thus yours abjectly
HENRY JAMES.
210
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
September 1913
68. Robert Lynd, review in Daily News and
Leader
12 September 1913, 2
Robert Lynd (1879 1949), writer and journalist.
Mr. Wells s new novel in its form, at least, ought to please Mr. Shaw.
It is a discussion as Mr. Shaw s ideal drama is a discussion. The hero
and heroine talk and write review articles to each other except while
they are entangled in the drama of a guilty love. Mr. Wells is less anxious
to tell a story or to portray characters than to let us know what Stratton
and Lady Mary thought about Imperialism or the world-wide subjection
of labour or votes for women. Stratton and Lady Mary and all the
rest of them are merely toy figures, like the figures in one of the author s
war games, moved this way and that, not by any inward-compulsion,
but by an outside intelligence. They have little reality except the reality
of Mr. Wells s ideas. We feel that if we pricked them they would bleed
arguments. In the last analysis they are simply collections of arguments
for the abolition of international and sexual jealousies.
It would, of course, be unfair to saddle Mr. Wells with the responsibility
for all the arguments his characters use. He represents rather the dramatic
conflict of arguments that occur to him while he is trying to puzzle out, as he
is always trying to puzzle out, what is wrong with the world. It is as though
he were making a desperate effort to explain the Universe in prose, and the
two lobes of his brain did not entirely agree on the matter. Bitterly conscious
of the existence of some curse of original sin in the human race, he is eager
to make it clear to himself and to us what this sin is which prevents men
211
H.G.WELLS
from being the splendid idealists who will build up the great World State
the republic of the brotherhood of man to which all the ends of the earth
must come. His answer, as we seem to find it in the present story, is at least
as old as Genesis. It is Eve who tempts Adam to his fall. Mr. Wells, however,
would put it more subtly than that. Adam, in his view, is not the victim of
Eve, but of the passion within him for mastering and subjecting Eve, and of
the passion of all the other Adam for mastering and subjecting Eve. His
jealousy, which is the ruin of the world, is merely this egoistic passion in
action against the family of men.
The lay figure of a story which Mr. Wells dresses up in his assorted arguments
is simple enough. Stratton and Lady Mary love each other as boy and girl.
Stratton and Lady Mary love each other as young man and young woman.
Lady Mary will not marry him, however, for he is only a clergyman s son with
a career to make, and she sees a better chance of being her own mistress in a
marriage with a rich financier which will give her the freedom that wealth
gives, instead of hampering her with the bonds that are an essential part of a
marriage for love. She is a character a little difficult to make out. Mr. Wells
seems inclined to idealise her to regard her as a type of womanhood to whom
the society of the future must in some way conform. To most people, however,
she will seem a clandestine and greedy person, a woman who demands all
concessions but will make none, an egoist of sex beyond any other character
in the book. She will not risk marrying her lover; neither will she let him go.
When he returns from South Africa (where he has distinguished himself in the
war) and is just on the point of falling in love with the angel in the house sort
of girl he afterwards marries, Lady Mary puts out her claw and makes him her
own again. They discover before long that friendship apart from love is beyond
their power, and Mr. Wells s hero seizes the occasion to expound his strong
conviction of the impossibility of anything like comradeship between men
and women at the present stage of civilisation.
Whether this is true or false and it is probably both the passionate
friendship between Stratton and Lady Mary ends in disaster. Lady Mary s
husband, who has up till then hardly opened his eyes, suddenly wakes up,
becomes what is called a regular Turk, makes Lady Mary little better than
a prisoner in his house, threatens divorce, and compels Stratton to agree
to go and live out of England for the next three years. The chapters
describing those three years of wandering are the fullest of argument of
any in the book. They might be described as a continuation of A Modern
Utopia and The Great State.*
*
A volume of essays by Wells and others (1912).
212
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
One would have thought that such a prolonged Cook s Tour of
sociological adventure would have effectually driven out the image of
Lady Mary, but not a bit of it. When Stratton returns, marries his angel
in the house, and begins his life-work of running a sort of peace stores
for all the world, Lady Mary once more comes down on him with a
letter, and there they are arguing away at it as volubly as ever. Love, it
may be admitted, has now given place to debate, and they do not even
meet, except once by accident when abroad. This meeting is the occasion
of much expression of bewilderment about things in general, for Stratton
and Lady Mary are both about as bewildered by life as a hen trying to
dodge a motor-car. The meeting, however, is big not only with argument,
but with fate. Lady Mary s husband, hearing of it, believes the worst
and renews the threat of divorce. It is in order to save her lover from
the disgrace of the divorce proceedings that Lady Mary suddenly puts
an end to her life and, incidentally, to the story.
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