. But we doubt
the quality of his determination and of the lasting influence of the
"more wonderful desires and ambitions replacing those discrepant
dreams." We have only followed Hoopdriver through a ten-day episode,
but all his story has been told.

We are in quite a different position with regard to Lewisham. The
history of his encounter with love and the world, published in 1900,
covers a period of four or five years, but while we leave him
down-at-heel, with a wife and a mother-in-law dependent upon him, and
the prospect of fatherhood adding to his responsibilities, we are
uncertain whither his career will take him. Lewisham is the first
sketch for the type that was to be elaborated in five subsequent
books. The allurements of his love for Ethel Henderson spoilt his
chances at the science school, but he has the quality that is so
conspicuously lacking in the Hoopdriver-Kipps-Polly succession.
Lewisham had some resolution, undoubted energy, and the beginnings of
that larger vision which was the gift of the later protagonists. But
he is not idealised; he comes nearer to the average of humanity than
the later pictures of his like; although they share with him that
tendency to sudden irascibility, to outbursts of a somewhat petty
temper against the obvious limitations of life--a common tendency
observable in nearly all Mr Wells' dominant male characters. Those few
years of Lewisham's life were so well done, so consistently developed,
that I have regretted the absence of a sequel. Indeed, I still regret
it, although I realise very well that Mr Wells' steady progress in the
conception of his own purpose as a writer has absolutely precluded
any return to an older method. Lewisham was not quite strong enough
to portray the further development of the dominant idea, not a
sufficiently tempered tool for the dissection of the modern world.

I have said little about the story of this fragment of Lewisham's
career; I have not even mentioned that deliciously plausible and able
rogue, Chaffery, the fraudulent medium; but in this essay I am more
concerned to trace the meaning of Mr Wells' books than to criticise or
praise the detail. With regard to the latter, the reader may always
feel so perfectly safe. He need have no doubt that description of
action, of mood, or of place will be vivid and convincing, true to
life and essential to the story. I do not pass this detail by because
I have found it better done in other contemporary