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 half-penny 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.  But, 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 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 specialization 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.  And yet such flashes are lost when one contemplates the steady shining of the whole.  “Tono-Bungay,” to my mind, marks the junction of the two paths which the variety of Wells’s gift has enabled him to follow simultaneously, and, at the same time, it is his most distinguished and most powerful book.