about Uncle Ponderevo.  He failed as a retail chemist in Wimblehurst.  He was not naturally dishonest, but he had windy ideas about finance, and he was careless in the matter of certain trust monies.  He was “imaginative, erratic, inconsistent, recklessly inexact,” and his imagination led him by way of a patent medicine to company promoting on the Hooley scale.  “Do you realise the madness of the world that sanctions such a thing?” asks Mr Wells in the person of the supposed narrator and points that question on a later page as follows:—­“At the climax of his Boom, my uncle at the most sparing estimate must have possessed in substance and credit about two million pounds’ worth of property to set off against his vague colossal liabilities, and from first to last he must have had a controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty millions.  This irrational muddle of a community in which we live gave him that, paid him at that rate for sitting in a room and scheming and telling it lies.  For he created nothing, he invented nothing, he economised nothing.  I cannot claim that a single one of the great businesses we organised added any real value to human life at all.”

The enormous success and rapid failure of this futile, ambitious little chemist—­a success that is, unhappily, only too conceivable and probable—­are seen against the background of his nephew’s life, Mr Wells has given a greater value and credulity to the legal criminalities of Ponderevo, by coming at him, as it were, through a wider angle; just as he achieves all the circumstances of reality in his romances by his postulation of an average eye-witness.  But there are many threads in George Ponderevo’s life that were not immediately intertwined with the Tono-Bungay career, and his love for Beatrice Normanby touches in quite another manner on the sex problem opened in Ann Veronica.  In both these books the story is the essential thing, and the attack upon social conditions is relatively indirect.  The general criticism is at times quite explicit, but it is subordinated.

In The New Machiavelli (1910) these relations are nearly reversed.  The detailed exposure of the moving forces that stimulate our political energies, occupies long sections into which the human relations of Remington (the form is again that of an autobiography) hardly enter, except in an occasional conversation to sharpen up a criticism.  This comment on politics (regarded in his own constituency, Remington says, not as a “great constructive process” but as a “kind of dog-fight”) is the chief theme; subsidiary to it is the comment on a society that could waste so valuable a life as Remington’s for the sake of a moral convention.  Both comments point Mr Wells’ expression of what he calls in this book “the essential antagonism ... in all human affairs ... between ideas and the established method—­that is to say, between ideas and the rule of thumb.”  And he adds:  “The world I hate is the rule-of-thumb world; the thing