unsuccessful marriage to Marion; his affair with the liberated Effie; and his doomed relationship with Beatrice Normandy, a belle dame sans merci whom he has known since childhood and who loves but refuses to marry him. George also tells of his frustrated love for his stern, austere mother, who was a domestic servant, and his powerful attachment to his aunt Susan, a character whose depiction may be, in part, a portrait of Wells's second wife, Amy Catherine Robbins (better known as Jane). Metaphysics So powerful have corrupting social forces become that they overcome and denature George's life, for while in his youth he was capable of virtue, love and creativity, he finds no ideal he can devote himself to. Instead he becomes the fabricator of powerful machines whose destructive potential can only be guessed at. The concluding chapter, "Night and the Open Sea", depicts a test run of the X2, a destroyer that George has designed and built. The vessel becomes a symbol of a metaphysical "something" that "drives", that "is at once human achievement and the most inhuman of all existing things". Reception and criticism Initial reviews were mixed. The novel was criticised by Hubert Bland and Robertson Nicoll, but the Daily Telegraph praised it as "a masterpiece". Gilbert Murray praised the book in three separate letters to the author, comparing Wells to Leo Tolstoy. Biographer Vincent Brome has written that "Tono-Bungay came fresh and vivid to men and women of Wells's generation. These great questionings, the challenge to one eternal verity after another, shook their world and their way of life, and it was all tremendously exciting". Wells himself was "disposed to regard Tono-Bungay as the finest and most finished novel upon the accepted lines" that he had "written or was ever likely to write". In the view of one of Wells's biographers, David C. Smith, Kipps, The History of Mr Polly and Tono-Bungay together make it possible for Wells "to claim a permanent place in English fiction, close to Dickens because of the extraordinary humanity of some of his characters, but also because of his ability to invoke a place, a class, a social scene. These novels are very personal as well, treating aspects of Wells's own life, matters which would come under attack later, but only after he added his sexual and extramarital views to the personal side of his work." The book was praised by