Making acquaintances

Monday, October 11th., Victoria Grove, London.

At the Symonds' last evening. I first met them a year ago and try to renew the acquaintance when I can. I think they are the most interesting women I know. As I listened to mother and daughter recounting their deeds and wanderings since I last saw them, I was struck by their faculty for extracting from life pleasure and amusement. They read everything that appears, travel during several months in the year, gamble soberly when gambling is to be had, and generally make it a duty to go through life with as much pleasantness and change as will not fatigue them. Both are witty, and neither is afraid of criticising her friends, or of getting fun out of idols. Emily, the daughter, writes clever novels under the pen-name George Paston, and exhibits a good-humoured, railing tolerance for all 'missions', including her own. She is a few years older than me and rather plain but what an excellent companion for a man of intelligence if she could be got to believe that she had anything to gain from a marriage.

H G Wells

Yesterday I wrote back to H.G.Wells who has honoured me by replying in a most friendly way to my recent letter seeking his acquaintance. He recently published a short story. "The Cone" which was set in the Potteries, and this fell in with my own developing idea that there are immense possibilities in the very romance of manufacture - not wonders of machinery and that sort of stuff - but in the tremendous altercation with nature that is continually going on. This is a passage from "The Cone" which exemplifies what I mean:

A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with mystery. Beyond were Hanley and Etruria grey and dark masses, outlined thinly by the rare golden dots of the street lamps.... Here and there a pallid patch and ghostly stunted beehive shapes showed the position of a pot-bank,, or a wheel, black and sharp against the hot lower sky, marked some colliery where they raise the iridescent coal of the place. Nearer at hand was the broad stretch of railway, and half invisible trains shunted... And to the left, between the railway and the dark mass of the low hill beyond, dominating the whole view, colossal, inky-black, and crowned with smoke and fitful flames, stood the great cylinders of the Jeddah Company Blast Furnaces.... They stood heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten iron, and about the feet of them rattled the rolling mills, and the steam hammer beat heavily and splashed the white iron sparks hither and thither.

I am quite sure that there is an aspect of industrial districts which is really grandiose, full of dark splendours and which has been absolutely missed by all novelists to date. Wells seems to be the first man I have come across whom the Potteries has impressed emotionally. There are a number of good men in the Potteries, but I have never yet met one who could be got to see what I have 'seen' there; they were all inclined to scoff. I think Wells will understand me.