A View of the "Authentic" Wells

167 3. A VIEW OF THE "AUTHENTIC" WELLS Richard Hauer Costa, H. G. Wells. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., I967. Disparaging H. G. Wells today is fashionable and easy; praising his early work extravagantly and forgiving him everything written after I910 is almost as easy. What is difficult, of course, is taking a statesmanlike purview of all his work, relating its strengths to its weaknesses, and examining both in detail when that would appear rewarding. The latter is the task Richard Hauer Costa has undertaken in his volume in the Twayne English Authors Series. He does not wholly succeed, but his effort is creditable. Kr. Costa follows the major trend of Wells criticism by insisting --almost tiresomely—that the best Wells novels and stories are gold and that the worst, which are far more numerous, are base metal. Understandably, he writes with the greatest zest and freshness when he assays the early work, as in this passage from his second chapter: The early fictional landscape of H. G. Wells is a canvas by Bruegel. One glimpses, along with the first sight of the spearhead ship of an invasion from Mars, a group of village urchins tossing stones at the cylinder that has fallen from the sky. One hears the bark of a cart-driver as he pulls up at Iping Village with the Invisible Man. . . . One smells horse manure and beer, and hears. . . the accent of the lower middle-class. . . . (pp. 24-25) He also effectively captures that moment in Wells* career when for a short period he is minting both gold (Klpps) and lead (A Modern Utopia). He uses this transitional period to divide Wells* output into "authentic" short stories and novels and those presumably inauthentic. No one will quarrel with the date he has chosen, 1910, but the term "authentic," which he uses several times, is unfortunate. The writer who became, in H. L. Mencken's memorable words, "a hawker of sociological liver pills" is the same person as the artist who created Dr. Moreau and Mr. Polly. The gold and the lead both bear the authentic H. G. W. hallmark. Facing that fact squarely is one of the obligations of Wells criticism. If he approaches the early work with zest, Mr. Costa comes at the later work with something approaching a sense of duty. And one wishes he had been less dutiful. He devotes forty-one pages to Wells* best fiction; nine pages to Wells at the crossroads; but sixty-six pages to those thirty leaden books "each contradicting the previous one and all assuming whistllng-in-the-dark postures," to use Mr. Costa's own words. Of course numbers of pages can be misleading. They would, for example, be most misleading if Mr. Costa had used the last third 168 of his book to display Wells, in Henry Jarees· scornful phrase, as "a mort, vivid and violent object lesson." This he does not do. He does not give us in their full force the disparaging views of James—nor of Virginia Woolf, Mencken, or Mark Schorer, to cite some of Wells* abler detractors. Nor does he attempt to refute the detractors either by analysis or a new reading of the stories and novels. Mr. Costa has written a useful volume that rounds up much of what Wells* ablest critics have written about him. His study is, therefore , a compendium—and a handy one—of earlier judgments of Wells' work rather than a fresh appraisal of it. University of Michigan Robert P. Weeks 4. OVERTURE TO AN UNWRITTEN SYMPHONY Ian Fletcher (ed), Romantic Mythologies. London: Routledge A Kegan Paul, I967. Although Sir Basil Willey spoke with some confidence about the "backgrounds" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he was more cautious in discussing the nineteenth century, entitling his books on the period simply Nineteenth Century Studies and More Nineteenth Century Studies. Professor Ian Fletcher displays a similar reticence. In his introduction to a collection of essays on the "background" of the nineteenth century, he writes that for this complex period "we may properly hope to recover inter-connections only, never coherences." At first one is relieved to find that Fletcher is alive to the dangers of making...