of it in all he
writes--with his own weakness and limitations; criticising himself as
he satirises the thing condemned, but striving without ceasing to
serve the purpose of that which he knows is "struggling to exist."
This, to me, is the spirit of H.G. Wells, and I find it a spirit that
is as admirable as it is human....

_The Passionate Friends_ (1913) is another experiment in exposition.
The very real and fine love of Stafford (the autobiographer in this
case) and Lady Mary Christian is spoiled, made to appear insignificant
and debased, by all the conventions and petty, unoriginal judgments
that go to the making of the rule of our society. The woman had to
make her choice between love in an undignified poverty for which all
her training had unfitted her, and a sterile ease and magnificence
that gave her those opportunities which her temperament and education
demanded. She chose for dignity and opportunity, was tempted to grasp
at love, and thus finally came into a blind alley from which death was
the only escape. It is another picture of the old conflict illustrated
in the persons of Ann Veronica and Marjorie Trafford; the constant
inability that our conditions impose on the desire to love
beautifully. The implicit demand is that for greater freedom for
women, socially and economically. Incidentally we see that the man,
Stafford, does not suffer in the same degree. His splendid love for
Lady Mary is thwarted, but he finds an outlet. It is a new aspect of
escape, by the way, for Stafford's illuminating business of spreading
and collating knowledge is a relief from the scientific research which
was in some form or another the specific of the earlier novels--if we
exclude Remington's political propaganda in _The New Machiavelli_, a
suggested solution that was, at the best, something half-hearted. And
Stafford's escape, and his version of going to the mountain apart--by
way of a sight of the East and of America--bring us back to that
integral theme which I have so insisted upon, even at the risk of
tedious repetition. "I was already beginning to see the great problem
of mankind," writes Stafford, "as indeed nothing other than a
magnification of the little problem of myself, as a problem in escape
from grooves, from preoccupations and suspicions, precautions and
ancient angers.... For all of us, as for each of us, salvation is
that. We have to get away from ourselves to a greater thing, to a
giant's desire and an unendin