There are, however, still two more novels to be disposed of before I can examine the full expression of Mr Wells’ purpose as I find it in his later books.  One of these novels, Kipps (1905), is the next in chronological order; the other, The History of Mr Polly, was published in 1910, interpolated between Ann Veronica and The New Machiavelli.  Both Kipps and Polly began active life in a draper’s shop.  The former is explicitly labelled “a simple soul.”  He is at once sillier and sharper than Hoopdriver, but, like that “dear fool” (the phrase is Mr Wells’), Kipps has some very sterling qualities.  He had the good fortune to come into money—­I cannot but count it good fortune in his case—­and was just wise enough to avoid a marriage with Helen Walshingham—­“County family.  Related to the Earl of Beaupres”—­and if he shirked that match rather from sheer funk than from any clear realisation of the futility of what he was avoiding, he did, at least, run away with and marry that very charming little housemaid, Ann Pornick, whom he had loved in his early boyhood.  After his marriage he lost the greater part of his money, and later recovered it again; but all these shocks of fortune left him the same simple soul, untroubled by any urgent problems outside the range of his personal experience.  His brief contact with the dreamer, Masterman, and his friendship with the capable young engineer-socialist, Sid Pornick, Ann’s brother, only roused Kipps to a momentary wonder, and his final enunciation of the great question was representative.  “I was thinking just what a Rum Go everything is,” he says.  That question, to quote Mr Wells, “never reached the surface of his mind, it never took to itself substance or form; it looked up merely as the phantom of a face might look, out of deep waters, and sank again into nothingness.”

Mr Polly is a third variant of the Hoopdriver-Kipps genus.  He had more initiative, although he still presents a problem in inertia, and he is the only one of the three who had a feeling for literature, and read persistently, if vagariously.  And Mr Polly did at last take his fate into his own hands, commit arson, desert his wife and wander off, an “exploratious adventurer,” as he might have put it, to discover some joy and poetry 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,