hardly justified!) We leave him at the door of the Putney shop full of resolution to read, to undertake his own education, in some way, no doubt, to better himself, as he might have phrased it.  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 writers; I have not; but because I find a pregnancy and a growing force behind these minutiae that is strangely lacking from any other works of fiction in which I can find any comparison.