-Bungay_; although there is a possible composite of
various women in the later books that may represent the general
insurgent character of recent young womanhood. But now that I have
made this too definite statement I want to go back over it, touch it
up and smooth it out. For if I have found Mr Wells' character types
too few and too specialised; and as if, with regard to his more or
less idealised males--such as Capes, George Ponderevo, Remington,
Trafford, Stafford--he had modelled and re-modelled them in the effort
to build up one finally estimable figure of masculine ability; there
still remains an enormous gallery of subsidiary portraits, for the
most part faintly caricatured, of men and women who do stand for
something in modern life; portraits that are valuable, interesting and
memorable. Nevertheless, I submit that Mr Wells' novels will not live
by reason of their characterisation.

The desire to write essays in this class of fiction does not seem to
have overcome Wells until the last few years. Before 1909, he had
written all his sociology and all his romances, with the exception of
_The World Set Free_, but only three novels--namely, _The Wheels of
Chance_, _Love and Mr Lewisham_ and _Kipps_; and none of them gives
any indication of the characteristic method of the later work.

The first of the three, published in 1896, is in one respect a
splendid answer to the objection against what has been called the
episodical novel. The story deals only with ten glorious days in the
life of Hoopdriver, a callow assistant in a draper's "emporium" at
Putney. He learnt to ride a bicycle, set out to tour the south coast
for his short summer holiday and rode into romance. One section of the
book is a trifle too hilarious, coming perilously near to farce, but
underlying the steady humour of it all is a perfectly consistent, even
saddening, criticism of the Hoopdriver type. He has imagination
without ability; life is made bearable for him chiefly by the means of
his poor little dreams and poses; he sees himself momentarily in the
part of a detective, a journalist, a South African millionaire, any
assumption to disguise the horrible reality of the draper's assistant;
and yet there is fine stuff in him. (Perhaps the suggested antithesis
is hardly justified!) We leave him at the door of the Putney shop full
of resolution to read, to undertake his own education, in some way, no
doubt, to better himself, as he might have phrased it