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loses his position there through the Socialistic tendencies which no reader
will be surprised to find in a hero of one of Mr. H.G.Wells s novels.
From Bladesover, after certain discouraging experiences in the household
of a violently Evangelical baker-uncle, the young Ponderevo is taken
to be apprenticed to the inventor of Tono-Bungay, the great creation
of this story, which bears the name of his own ingenious fraud. Edward
Ponderevo Uncle Ted is of the same class as Chaffery in Love and
Mr. Lewisham a class which Mr. Wells portrays with something of the
analytic skill animating Browning s Sludge. He is an absolute impostor,
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THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
of very narrow wits, but of inveterate opportunism, who so thoroughly
deceives himself into crediting his own lies that the reader (who is naturally
behind the scenes) finds his sympathy compelled to take the impostor s
side against the very world he wrongs. Specious, slippery, enthusiastic,
born with the quick mastery over circumstances which helps every village
Napoleon to control his own fate up to a certain fatal point, Ponderevo
is a masterpiece of whim, the very conception of which would have been
impossible to the novelist of fifty years ago. He is entirely a product of
later-day competition, of the Americanisation (perhaps) of English business
morality. His fall, of course, is inevitable. The reader begins to perceive
it while it is already afar off; but, when it comes, the pathos of it drowns
out all the half-conscious humours of the situation. His true epitaph is
pronounced by his devoted, if continually contemptuous, wife: & It
wasn t fair, George; it wasn t fair. Life and Death great serious things
why couldn t they leave him alone, and his lies and ways? If we could
see the lightness of it& Why couldn t they leave him alone? & It is
very true. Ponderevo, wildly irresponsible, a pierrot of the counting-
house, a Napoleon among the dispensing bottles, was not one to be
brought face to face with austere problems of justice and morality. His
life is one vast panorama of human waste, and that is, indeed, the theme
of the entire story.
For Waste dire, irremediable human Waste this is the black angel
which spreads its wings over the whole record of Tono-Bungay. Mr.
Wells s sincerity compels respect, even where his depression becomes
almost intolerable, and the grey pessimism of his outlook is not to be
resisted. With all the old definite pathology of Love and Mr. Lewisham,
he pricks the bubble of Modern Love, leaving little remaining beyond
crude physical attraction and equally crude, recurrent repulsion. His
women waste his men (and themselves) in a vain conflict of the emotions:
his stage is as full of the dead bodies of hopes and yearnings as the
final platform of Hamlet. The sermon which Mr. Wells preaches (and,
even in a novel, he is never long out of the pulpit) is the dreary lesson
of futility. We make our lives, he says, one vast dismal spectacle of
witless waste. Something, perhaps, emerges from the fog at intervals,
some shaft of light amid the cloud-wrack& . Sometimes I call it Science,
sometimes I call it Truth. & but all in a moment the clouds have closed
again, and there is no answer, nor any to regard. We are all things that
make and pass, striving upon a hidden mission, out to the open sea ;
and for the most part, what we make for ourselves is either a fraud or
a failure. It is a dark reflection, darkly imagined; but it is Mr. Wells s
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H.G.WELLS
contribution to philosophy. And in Tono-Bungay it is embodied in actual
life, with all the intense conviction of a masterpiece.
49. Beatrice Webb, diary entry
24 February 1909
Extract from unpublished MS. diary, Passfield Papers.
Wells had resigned from the Fabian Society in September 1908,
and what had begun as a political battle with the Executive continued
as a personal quarrel with the Webbs. This extract from Beatrice
Webb s diary is immediately preceded by her reaction to a grudging
letter from him (22 February 1909) on the publication of her
Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission.
His two last books War in the Air and Tono-Bungay are amazingly
clever bits of work. I have the bad taste to prefer the former. Both illustrate
the same theme the mean chaos of human affairs. But War in the Air
is avowedly a sort of allegory or a parody In form, an extravaganza,
it is, in substance, a realistic description of the lowest and poorest side
of social life. Tono-Bungay, on the other hand, sets out to be a
straightforward description of society as it exists today a sober estimate
of the business world. But it turned out to be a veritable caricature
and a bitter one. Moreover, it bores me, because its detail is made up,
not of real knowledge of the world he describes, but of stray bits he
has heard from this or that person. There are quite a lot of things he
has picked up from me anecdotes about business men that I have told
him are woven into his text, just all wrong conveying an absurd
impression of meaningless chaos. But he is a useful missionary to whole
crowds of persons whom we could never get at. It will be sad if he turns
completely sour: if after all, it turns out to be a misfortune to the cause
we both believe in that we should have known one another.
150
50. Charles L.Graves, unsigned review
in Spectator
27 February 1909, cii, 346
C.L.Graves (1856 1944), assistant editor of the Spectator from
1899 to 1917.
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, monologues, and essays, which so closely accord with the
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