It is no business of mine to justify the sexual ethics of Wells. But there is a difference between a fact and an intention, and what I have just said serves to explain the intention. Consider, in the light of it, a few of his characters, both in and out of marriage. Ann Veronica from the first frankly owns that she is not in love with Manning, but every kind of social hypnotism is brought into motion to work on her ignorance of life and to confuse her sense of free-will. George Ponderevo simply outgrows Marion; but you cannot expect him not to grow, and who is responsible for the limited, furtive, second-hand world in which Marion has lived and which has irrevocably moulded her? Margaret's world, too, is a second-hand world, though on a socially higher plane: she lives in a pale dream of philanthropy and Italian art, shocked beyond any mutual understanding by everything that really belongs in the first-hand world of her husband. These characters meet and pass one another like moving scales; they never stand on quite the same plane. And then the inevitable always occurs. For, just as the Children of the Food cannot consort with the little folk they promise to supersede, so it appears to be a fixed part of the programme of Wells that New Republicans can only love other New Republicans with success.
He implies this indeed in _A Modern Utopia_:
"A man under the Rule who loves a woman who does not follow it, must either leave the Samurai to marry her, or induce her to accept what is called the Woman's Rule, which, while it exempts her from the severer qualifications and disciplines, brings her regimen into a working harmony with his."
"Suppose she breaks the Rule afterwards?"
"There is matter for a novel or so in that."
Wells has written six himself. _Love and Mr. Lewisham, Ann Veronica, Tono-Bungay, The New Machiavelli, Marriage, The Passionate Friends_, are all variations on this theme. In one of these alone life's double motive succeeds in establishing itself, and it is for this reason that _Marriage_, to my thinking the weakest of his novels from an artistic point of view, is the most important concrete presentation of the philosophy of Wells. It is an inferior book, but it gives one the sense of a problem solved. By passing through a necessary yet feasible discipline, Trafford and Marjorie bridge over the gap between haphazard human nature and the better nature of socialism, and become Samurai in fact.