Four of his novels deal with the upper classes of English society. The Man of Property (1906) treats of the wealthy class, The Country House (1907) presents the conservative country squire, Fraternity (1909) portrays the intellectual class, and The Patrician (1911) pictures the aristocrat.  Galsworthy is the relentless analyist of well-to-do, conventional English society.  As Frederic Taber Cooper well says, “British stolidity, British conservatism, the unvarying fixity of the social system, the sacrifice of individual needs and cravings to caste and precedent and public opinion,—­these are the themes which Mr. Galsworthy never wearies of satirizing with a mordant irony.”

Since his object is to present problems of life, many of his characters are but types.  On the other hand, Soames Forsyte in The Man of Property, Lord Miltoun, Mrs. Noel, and Lady Casterley in The Patrician, are among the most brilliant and real characters in modern fiction.  Galsworthy’s style is clear, his plot construction is excellent, and his humor in caricaturing social types has many of the qualities of Dickens’s.

Herbert George Wells.—­Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1866.  He expected to be a shopkeeper and was apprenticed in his fourteenth year to a chemist; but this did not satisfy his ambition.  Later, however, he won scholarships that enabled him to take a degree in science.  While preparing himself to graduate from the University of London, he worked in Huxley’s laboratory.  The experiments there inspired him to write stories based on scientific facts and hypotheses, such as The Time Machine (1895) and In the Days of the Comet (1906).  Wells is also vitally interested in problems of sociology.  The Discovery of the Future (1902) and The Future in America (1906) present possibilities of scientifically planning man’s further development. Kipps:  The Story of a Simple Soul (1905) and Marriage (1912) are his best works, considered as actual novels of character. Kipps is a bitter but strong portrayal of the pretense and hypocrisy of society and of its inertia in responding to human needs, and Marriage is a subtle, psychological analysis of a conjugal misunderstanding and an attempted readjustment.  Wells’s study of man as a biological development and his preference of actual facts to sentimental conclusions are in accord with the trend of modern social science.

[Illustration:  HERBERT GEORGE WELLS.]

The work of Wells covers a wide range of subjects.  He has written scientific romances, blood-curdling tales, strange phantasies, prophetic Utopias, and sociological novels.  He shows an increasing tendency to depict the human struggle with environment, heredity, and the manifold forces that affect the earning of a livelihood.  His characters are more often remembered as specimens exhibiting some phase of life than as attractive or repellent personalities.  Increasing power of portraying character, however, is evident in his later work.  He has a daring imagination, a sense of humor, satiric power, and a capacity for expressing himself in vivid and picturesque English.