WELLS’ NEW STORY.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 3669, 2 November 1912, Page 9

WELLS’ NEW STORY.

MAN’S PART IS TO BEST HIS FELLOWS. WOMAN AND HER CHILDREN MAY GO SPLENDIDLY. Mr H. G. Wells’s new novel is called 1 ‘Marriage.” It “is the old story of young romantic love being almost stifled by the pressure of economic circumstances which civilised -marriage involves,” says the “Glasgow Herald.” “But Trafford and his wife, Marjorie, have sufficient strength of mind tq win free of the coil of circumstance before it is too late. The welter of civilisation, the busy death which is modern existence, never quite atiophies their emotions though they must needs escape to the wilds of Labrador that they may possess their own souls for a while, and so come hack to their days work with a surer and deeper "understanding of themselves and of each other. - “There are many passages of vivid description in the hook; and the account of the life of Trafford and his wife at Lonely Hut—the terrible, glorious struggle* with nature at her wildest throughout Northern winter —is perhaps the most beautiful thing that Mr, Wells has ever written. It is a straggle, face to face, with death at the grimmest; and in the conflict Trafford and Marjorie find themselves, and find .God.” MARJORIE’S STORY. “Marjorie is college bred, a student of science, a woman with the possibilities of a personal career,” says Mr

M. P. Willcocks in the “Daily Chronicle.” “She is the woman of a transition ago, and, -except that she can produce children, a hopeless failure. She allows her family to hustle her into an engagement with a man whose type would die out if women had any discrimination. That broken off, .‘ho marries a scientist with a great future bofere him, one of those who are born to drive further and further back the darkness of human ignorance. Instead of bending to Jos task, research into the secrets of the atom, ho lias to spend his days oiseovering a cheap substitute for rubber —because Marjorie’s metier is to spend artistically. She is life, t/ie life that grasps at things; he, in Iris intellect, is the flame that rises out of life. And to life he is sacrificed, research goes by the hoard, arid the shekels are heaped up, because his wife demands them.” , HER TASTE IN HANGINGS. j

“To find the wherewithal to carry Marjorie’s taste in hangings and such like, he had to leave his laboratory and earn uncongenial guineas by writing scientific notes and delivering suburban lectures,” says the “Observer.” “But just as we begin to apprehend the approach of sordid is- ; sues the story is switched off on to j another plane. Trafford has happen- j ed to mention to a commercial friend j that he has solved the problem of syn- ! thotie rubber (it is only the perfectly j first-class novelists who can afford to be so very airy); the friend informs him that there is money in it; Mat - jorie, it comes home to him, is a woman who ought to have the chance of expressing herself in lovely furniture : and so we have the Professor winning wealth in the midst of syndicates, while poor Research is left lamenting.” _ j MARITAL DISCONTEN L .

“With careful soliciture for a public anxious to avoid looking beneath the surface, Mr Wells,” says the “Athanaeum,” draws his .r dience re f>fze all unsuspectingly <■' He v< rv roots of" marital discontent—ihe Jack of objectives in life; which, neverth.'arc held deep down in c.imi: -h by man and wife, though beloved to l.b the monopoly of the one who sup- i - nemlly has the greater po.ver i f fulb 1 - mt-iil.' Air. Wells then Lads us u> view the sort of truncated which ensues when one of the partre! s abandons real work in a gush <;? sympathy for the fulfilment of what is thought to be the essential reed of the other. Pungently he si-1.5 forth the unfortunate corollary to the nt’all ment of means to Society's rrc un'emeiits:

1) EPRIVED SORT 0F M AN. • ■ don’t believe that tie >r«i>• of people who make money in ip e;\ 1lisation forward any more than tl » smoke that comes out of the engine helps the train forward. If you’ve got big gifts and you choose to tob all you know and give’away everything.you can do in the way of work, you've' got to give up the ideas of wealth and security, and that means fine women and children. You’ve got to be a deprived sort of man. “All right,” you say. “That’s me!” But how about your wife being a deprived soft of woman? Eh? That’s where it gets you 1 And meanwhile, you know, while you make your sacrifices and do your researches, there’ll be little-mean sharp active beasts making money all over you like maggots on a cheese.' ”

YOUR SORT AND MINE.’

" "The practical trouble between your sort and my sort, Marjorie, is the trouble between faith and realisa - tion. You demand the outcome. Oh! and I hate to turn aside and realise. I've had to do it for seven years. Damnable years! Mon of my sort want to understand. Wo want to understand and you ask us to make. We want to understand atoms, ions, molecules, refractions." You ask us to make rubber and diamonds. 1 suppose it’s right that incidentally we should make rubber and diamonds. Finally, I warn you, we will make rubber unnecessary and diamonds valueless. And again we want to understand how people react upon one another to produce social consequences, and you ask us to put it at once into a draft bill for the reform ot something or other.’ ” j THE CLEAR ISSUE. J “One of the most remarkable pas- j sages is a picture of the older view J of woman, as typified in the families of certain wealthy Jews,” says Mr. Willcocks. “Here the issue is clear, ! woman is beautiful, desirable, the crowning thing for which men strug- , gle; a man’s part is to best his fel- 1 lows that his woman may go splendidly—his woman and her children. Other folk’s children don’t, of course, matter. It was in this way that civilisation as wo know it was made. And by every standard of decency such civilisation stands condemned; yet of

it woman was the motive "power-. But Marjorie has to come down to her man’s side, to share her man’s purposes, to join with him in the light. Bound for far longer than he in the narrow circle of the family, she, too, must learn to wander, to essas tin, great adventure, to plumb the depths of ignorance, to conquer power for herself. So, Air. Wells sends his typi cal woman into wintry Labrador as. in the future, she must go out into the wilderness of the unknown, side by side with man. She must go, it lie is to_ go.”

“What their thinking came to is very much what Mr "Wells has written before upon matters of sored leoore struction. But there ,s a hi* onee on the need of a sincere persistent, and not too proximate or selfish aim for those who would have life yield to them its fullest relish,” says the “Observer.”

“In Air. AYells’s woman,” says the ‘‘Saturday Review,” “we recognise not a single member of the sex, but someone who has in her something of all the women whom we know to-day, and who is yet a creature with an absolutely definite personality.”