Mr. Wells is fond of mixing fake chemistry and social reality. He has succeeded in two kinds of fiction, which he should keep distinct, the Jules Verne romance and the novel of present-day life. He persists in putting the two in the same book, and they simply will not blend even under his skilful stirring-spoon. In "Tono-Bungay" he gave us a good picture of a quack millionaire, full of the spirit of the living age. It was set in a realistic scene and was true to life. Then for no reason at all he sent his hero in search of a mysterious metal called "quap," which does not exist and so never burnt the bottom out of the ship. "Quap" destroys the illusion of the book. About the time that quap begins to do its work, the book ceases to be a novel. "Marriage" almost ceases to be a novel when the couple go to Labrador. The introduction of love business into the comet story is an impertinence, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has complained. Mr. Wells's incurable taste for romantic adventure on a plane removed from life--usually an aeroplane that does what no aeroplane has done yet--vitiates his realism; and his concessions to the "love interest" do not help his experiments in scientific "futurism." He is best when he keeps separate the two sides of his genius. On the other hand, his extraordinary skill in feathering social truth with romance, and his equally extraordinary skill in making a monster of romance eat real hay are the virtues of his vices. His tracts read like novels, and his novels often carry shrewdly concealed tracts. He is, next to Bernard Shaw, the most irritating and the most widely read revolutionary economist who writes our language. Like Mr. Shaw, he is a rather tame revolutionist; he has never got free from the middle-class, emancipated clerk view of life, and his romantic sense sometimes corrupts his sense of social fact as it does his sense of scientific fact. But he always thinks in ambush behind his most trivial narrative. And when he comes forth avowedly as a thinker and theorist, he has the vivacity of phrase, the sparkle of manner which serve him when he is making fiction. Moreover, in spite of his intense modernity and his contempt for ancient elegancies and traditional beauties, he can write fine, rhythmic, luminously visual prose; like all imaginative men who deal in words, he is a bit of a poet. His account of "the last war" has in it something of the quality of the epic: "Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth. Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy pounding of Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong swoop to death?" JOHN MASEFIELD