SNAP SHOTS
Middleton, George
Snap Shots By GEORGE MIDDLETON ONE HAS LEARNED to expect that each novel of H.G. Wells will be an analysis of a social problem. His mind is restless and his hand is nervous for the knife. He...
...A passing Fox, who failed to see The aim of such activity, Essayed the following remark: "O what an idiot you be— No hound nor hunter is in sight...
...He makes it: they spend more money...
...The Judicial Mind is unable to see anything that is not written in the Statutes—as it reads them—or law Reports of Cases several hundreds of years old, and teetotally objects to Change...
...Trafford is a scientist with a future, six hundred pounds a. year and not the trace of commercial ambition...
...Take Marriage (Duffield,) for instance, and see with what keenness he analyzes the problem...
...Wells draws the picture of this life for nearly two hundred pages, and then he really starts the wheels of adjustment between the Traffords...
...Marjorie has come from a chaotic background of pseudo-culture and self deceptions and posturings...
...Debts begin to stare him in the face, and soon, by what Marjorie feels at first is a lucky chance, he has an opportunity to make money...
...we nestle in our chairs, tell him to do his worst and expose us...
...It is entirely ignorant of the results of Progress and of almost every matter of common knowledge regarding modern conditions of life...
...It requires proof of what every other mind knows, is slow in movement, and is able to construe plain English language to mean something entirely different from what Webster ever imagined or any other mind would deem possible...
...more children come...
...They return to London months later with their problem solved —as they think...
...But this at least, one feels after the book is placed on the desk: the Traffords have really only just begun to live...
...at least, as the world views it...
...But there is hope for the Judicial Mind...
...That he makes us think is sufficient...
...To which the Boar: "Advisedly— For it would never do for me To wait and fix them during fight...
...To the Judicial Mind the idea that Life is or ought to be more sacred than Property is the most abhorrent possible...
...There is no third person involved in this sex study: if there be a correspondent to blame for the threatened separation of man and wife, it is society...
...Freed from the cobwebs which now enmesh it everybody will admire and respect it instead of being, as nearly everybody is now, irritated by it.—Satire...
...Exactly what she is to do is not clear only that they are to be bound together by a common aim and sustained by a mutual faith...
...for we have a strange idea that if we accept the institutionalized life of marriage and obey its eternal canons we are perfectly proper...
...The Judicial Mind, however, has great merits when occasionally it breaks from its fetters and would be a very excellent sort of mind if it was only Judicious as well as Judicial...
...Be it remembered, however, that while the Judicial Mind lives under the conditions stated the Judicial Personage uses electricity, the telegraph, the railroad, the palatial hotel and all the other conveniences and luxuries of to-day which the Judicial Mind ignores—the Owner of the Judicial Mind being entirely distinct from the Mind itself and quite aware of changed conditions...
...This, for Wells, describes the London of the day, with its false standards of luxury, success and the gabble-gobble of make believe intelligence...
...For 'tis a precept certainly All Christian people should abhor...
...It is not always easy to follow the author in some of these pages, as much of the meaning is merely hinted at and suggested behind the mask of Trafford's long sustained delirium...
...That it is which makes so many adjustments in marriage difficult: for marriage is ever more than the affair of two people finding each other: it is the task of finding themselves and living happily together afterwards in a world of false gods...
...It has been getting so many shocks of late that a fissure is likely soon to appear in it through which Common Sense and Modernity will penetrate and in time undermine its rock-ribbed Precedents and Prejudices...
...The Judicial Mind travels in a Rut by Stage Coach, lives in a Cave, reads Ancient Tomes by Candle light, thinks of Hard and Fast Rule, and is dogmatic and blind to most everything that has happened since the time of Blackstone and Coke...
...Each senses the change in the other...
...and more restlessness and discontent...
...MORAL This fable teaches cogently "In time of peace prepare for war"— But, child, I hope you don't agree...
...The Judicial Mind THE JUDICIAL MIND is bounded on the North by Precedent and Property, on the South by Technicality and Property, on the East by Antiquity and Property, and on the West by Property...
...Wells attempts in this novel...
...but being the latter apparently prevents it from being the former...
...Failure comes when one or the other, or both, begin to worship them...
...The difficulty is to find what are the true altars of life— and that is what Mr...
...But when the child comes and Marjorie later finds time on her hands, Trafford, too, is dissatisfied with his own incapacity to work as he had before marriage...
...she has brains, beauty, health and a capacity to spend money...
...But there is much in this book which will arouse discussion, unlike many of his other works, it is conventionally moral...
...They must put their nicely chiseled phrases about themselves to the test of experience: they must solve the problem not only as it seems to them on their deserted snow-lined shore, but as it will be in the world of men where most of us have to work out our lives...
...Here is the artistic strength of the book and the weakness of the author's solution—if such it may be called...
...In the long hours of Trafford's recovery from his injuries obtained in an exciting struggle with a lynx, Marjorie has cared for him and together they have talked themselves out: Trafford achieves what he believes is to be his chief mission—service that will lead to greater understanding...
...in a moving scene led up to by a cumulative series of persuasive episodes, they resolve to go to the wilds of Labrador for a time, to find themselves through contact with nature...
...He goes into a commercial venture resolving to return to his research work after he has made his fortune...
...This they do...
...He would trace the thin lines of our social diseases, lay bare the festers and offer us the stimulus of his diagnosis if not a ready cure...
...for solutions are at best mere tempting theories until they are put to the test of life: until that time comes, too, we must merely strive to understand and agitate—which latter observation, by the way, happens to be one of his pet theories, I unconsciously borrowed...
...Fables in Verse (AFTER AESOP) By WILLIAM ELLERV LEONARD To be published in book form by the Open Court THE WILD BOAR AND THE FOX A WILD BOAR stood beneath a tree And sharpened tusks against the bark...
...He frequently does...
...To those who have felt the thrill of this galvanic writer, a new book is always welcome...
...Not that the case he chooses is typical except as it touches the marriage of the highly civilized working out the problem of adjustment under pressure of an unhealthy social scheme...
Vol. 4 • October 1912 • No. 42
