om 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 I and my kind exist for
primarily is battle with that, to annoy it, disarrange it, reconstruct
it." This confession is so lucid and characteristic that I cannot
improve upon it, and yet I see that it is a statement li