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character, Susan Ponderevo, the wife of the quack medicine-man, whose
undistinguished but delightful humour renders her almost as captivating
a personage as the immortal Mr. Hoopdriver.
153
51. Arnold Bennett, review in New Age
4 March 1909, n.s. iv, 384 5
This review appeared in Bennett s regular column,  Books and
Persons , under the pseudonym  Jacob Tonson . It was reprinted
in Books and Persons (1917), 109 16.
Wells! I have heard that significant monosyllable pronounced in various
European countries, and with various bizarre accents. And always there
was admiration, passionate or astonished, in the tone. But the occasion
of its utterance which remains historic in my mind was in England. I was
indeed in Frank Richardson s Bayswater.  Wells? exclaimed a smart, positive,
little woman one of those creatures that have settled every question once
and for all beyond re-opening  Wells? No! I draw the line at Wells.
He stirs up the dregs. I don t mind the froth, but dregs I will not
have! And silence reigned as we stared at the reputation of Wells lying
dead on the carpet. When, with the thrill of emotion that a great work
communicates, I finished reading Tono-Bungay, I thought of the smart
little woman in the Bayswater drawing-room. I was filled with a holy
joy because Wells had stirred up the dregs again, and more violently than
ever. I rapturously reflected,  How angry this will make them!  Them
being the whole innumerable tribe of persons, inane or chumpish (this
adjective I give to the world), who don t mind froth, but won t have dregs.
Human nature you get it pretty complete in Tono-Bungay, the entire
tableau! If you don t like the spectacle of man whole, if you are afraid
of humanity, if humanity isn t good enough for you, then you had better
look out for squalls in the perusal of Tono-Bungay. For me, human nature
is good enough. I love to bathe deep in it. And of Tono-Bungay I will
say, with solemn heartiness,  By God! This is a book!
You will have heard that it is the history of a patent medicine the
nostrum of the title. But the rise and fall of Tono-Bungay and its inventor
make only a small part of the book. It is rather the history of the collision
of the soul of George Ponderevo (narrator, and nephew of the medicine-
154
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
man) with his epoch. It is the arraignment of a whole epoch at the bar
of the conscience of a man who is intellectually honest and powerfully
intellectual. George Ponderevo transgresses most of the current codes,
but he also shatters them. The entire system of sanctions tumbles down
with a clatter like the fall of a corrugated iron church. I do not know
what is left standing, unless it be George Ponderevo. I would not call
him a lovable, but he is an admirable, man. He is too ruthless, rude,
and bitter to be anything but solitary. His harshness is his fault, his
one real fault; and his harshness also marks the point where his attitude
towards his environment becomes unscientific. The savagery of his
description of the family of Frapp, the little Nonconformist baker, and
of the tea-drinkers in the housekeeper s room at Bladesoever, somewhat
impairs even the astounding force of this, George s first and only novel
not because he exaggerates the offensiveness of the phenomena, but because
he unscientifically fails to perceive that these people are just as deserving
of compassion as he is himself. He seems to think that, in their deafness
to the call of the noble in life, these people are guilty of a crime; whereas
they are only guilty of a misfortune. The one other slip that George
Ponderevo has made is a slight yielding to the temptation of caricature,
out of place in a realistic book. Thus he names a halfpenny paper,  The
Daily Decorator, and a journalistic peer,  Lord Boom. Yet the few lines
in which he hints at the tactics and the psychology of his Lord Boom
are masterly. So much for the narrator, whose  I writes the book. I assume
that Wells purposely left these matters uncorrected, as being essential
to the completeness of George s self-revelation.
I do not think that any novelist ever more audaciously tried, or failed
with more honour, to render in the limits of one book the enormous
and confusing complexity of a nation s racial existence. The measure
of success attained is marvellous. Complete success was, of course,
impossible. And, in the terrific rout, Ponderevo never touches a problem
save to grip it firmly. He leaves nothing alone, and everything is handled
handled! His fine detachment, and his sublime common sense, never
desert him in the hour when he judges. Naturally his chief weapon in
the collision is just common sense; it is at the impact of mere common
sense that the current system crumbles. It is simply unanswerable common
sense which will infuriate those who do not like the book. When common
sense rises to the lyric, as it does in the latter half of the tale, you have
something formidable. Here Wells has united the daily verifiable actualism
of novels like Love and Mr. Lewisham and Kipps, with the large manner
of the paramount synthetic scenes in (what general usage compels me
155
H.G.WELLS
to term) his  scientific romances. In the scientific romance he achieved,
by means of parables (I employ the word roughly) a criticism of tendencies
and institutions which is on the plane of epic poetry. For example, the
criticism of specialisation in The First Men in the Moon; the mighty
ridicule of the institution of sovereignty in When the Sleeper Wakes,
and the exquisite blighting of human narrow-mindedness in  The Country
of the Blind  this last one of the radiant gems of contemporary literature,
and printed in The Strand Magazine! In Tono-Bungay he has achieved
the same feat, magnified by ten or a hundred, without the aid of symbolic
artifice. I have used the word  epic, and I insist on it. There are passages
toward the close of the book which may fitly be compared with the
lyrical freedoms of no matter what epic, and which display an unsurpassable
dexterity of hand. Such is the scene in which George deflects his flying-
machine so as to avoid Beatrice and her horse by sweeping over them.
A new thrill, there, in the sexual vibrations! One thinks of it afterwards. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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