try in life after a heroic battle that he funked most
horribly and might have avoided. This may sound rather a criminal
record, and even so I have taken no account of his fraud on the Life
Assurance Company, but no one could ever condemn Mr Polly--or wish him
a happier employment than that he finally achieved partly by luck and
partly by his own effort. He was the sport of the forces that break
out so ungovernably in this haphazard world. As the "high-browed
gentleman living at Highbury" explains: "Nothing can better
demonstrate the collective dullness of our community, the crying need
for a strenuous, intellectual renewal, than the consideration of that
vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained,
and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that
inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great
proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to
the unemployed and the unemployable." And that is the moral we may lay
to heart from the presentation of these three quite lovable and quite
futile draper's assistants. Their stories are told without
didacticism; the method displays at its brightest Mr Wells' intimate
knowledge and understanding of the life and speech of the class
portrayed; the developments are natural and absorbing enough to hold
the interest of the most idle reader; and here and there, perhaps, an
intelligent man or woman may be stirred to realise that he or she is
in part responsible for the futility of a Hoopdriver or a Kipps, or
for the jovial crimes of Mr Polly....

I come now to the six novels which represent most truly the striving,
persistent idealism of the mature Wells. In these books he has come to
the mastery of his own technique--so far as a man may ever master it.
He admits that there remain inexpressible visions, he is apt at times
to be overtaken by his own mannerisms (a fault that in no way affects
the enjoyment or enlightenment of the average reader), but he has
wrought and perfected a delicate instrument of style that is finely
adapted to his purpose. I cannot avoid speaking of "purpose" in
relation to these five books, and yet the word is misleading. I do not
mean by it that Mr Wells has ever sat down to write a novel with the
deliberate intention of converting an honest reader or so. But I do
mean that he has tried very deliberately to express his own attitude
in these books, and that whether or not he was intentionally a