or show.

The weakness of his attacks is that the ideal with which he would
illuminate his background is shifty, uncertain, ill-realised; being
undetermined, the function that is allotted to the human ideal is
actually left to chance, to accidental impulse rather than to
conscious will--to human frailty rather than to human strength. Hence
it is that he declares the rights of sex where its claims are weakest;
now applauds the conduct of Remington, now apologises for it; now
explains elaborately that his mere sensual side would assert itself,
now that sex never appealed to him without an admixture of the ideal;
now cries out for discussion and public enlightenment on this subject,
and now acknowledges that Remington, who had discussed it for years,
acted on impulse, in the dark. How uncertain it all is, how mixed in
its motives, how brilliantly bewildering in its conclusions--and yet
how clever!

It was probably a passing phase in Mr. Wells' history, an unhappy
phase for him, presumably, but inevitable. In the uneasy period of
irritation and defiance he lost none of his skill in self-portraiture,
in projecting himself upon the canvas of modern life. It was that vein
of undefined Romanticism in him, according so ill with the life of
"public affairs," that put him out of harmony with himself. Such an
ideal as he had formed for himself could never by its nature
completely satisfy any but the solitary recluse, and had little to
give to man in his social capacity, still less to the man whom he
depicted in _Marriage_, irritated, frustrated, drained of his higher
energies by the irritating calls of society. Long before, in _A
Modern Utopia_, he had prescribed for his Samurai rulers a periodical
course of solitude and meditation in the desert. In the book which,
while I write, is the last of his books--_Marriage_--he comes back to
the same idea. He depicts a hero full of scientific ardour and
intellectual ambition who finds that in the social life there is
nothing to satisfy his deepest needs, and that only in turning his
back on the world of people and flying to commune with God, nature,
and himself, in solitude, can he attain the mystical peace he longs
for. The social world which becomes an obsession to Trafford, his
hero, is made to swarm about him through the inevitable net of
marriage--although it is marriage to a fascinating woman whom he still
loves. At first he had sacrificed his scientific ideal to the domestic
and